Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, A Video Games Podcast. I’m Sammy Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, sorry to pull you out with your bachelor weekend to record this episode. This is perhaps the earliest we’ve ever recorded an episode in terms of like lead up time. So this is more than a month before this episode goes live. So we’re recording this on the 10th of October. This is going live in late November. How do you feel about the fact that I have ruined your weekend to yourself? It’s fine. It’s given me something to do. To tell you the truth, I don’t really know how to occupy my time these days when I am left alone. So I played two hours, the last two hours of Ratchet and Clank on PS5. And this will definitely be better than that. Oh, wow. Brutal. Well, I mean, we can litigate that when we get to the Games of the Year episode and later on for 2021. But this episode is the latest in our series of the best games of X year podcast. So we’ve been covering the entire time that me and Matthew worked in games media or media generally. And we’re gonna do a bit earlier than that, I think as well. And we’re gonna fill in some gaps. So, so far for those listening, these are always our most popular episodes. We’ve done 2006, seven, eight, nine and 10. We’ve also done the best games of 2020, obviously, because we did that when that year ended. So we’re getting through these a little bit now. And Matthew, this is what I would term recent history. This is a decade ago. And I remember a lot of these games quite vividly. They’re actually in some ways the hardest to talk about because with the ones in 07, I’ve replayed a lot of them and 08. But in this era, there are fewer games I’ve replayed, but lots of games I loved. How do you feel about 2011 at a glance? Yeah, I think I’ve written about a lot of these games, like either recently or recently enough that they’re still kind of lodged in my brain. So I didn’t have too many problems on that front. But yeah, you are right. It’s kind of like, it’s 10 years ago, but also there’s traumas here. I still feel really fresh. This is a year that’s got a lot of, my favorite games in it. It’s just, there’s a lot happening. You’re right. You’re kind of heading towards the second half of the console generation and everyone understands the hardware is, making elaborate shiny things. I would say at a glance, Matthew, the thing I forgot about this year is that it was quite big on HD remasters. Those seem to be like a thing around this time. I think the God of War collection kicked off a little bit earlier, but this is the year where everyone seemed to be doing like re-releases of stuff. Did you pick up on that when you were going over the year? I didn’t jump out at me. I think because like none of that stuff was on Wii or 3DS or DS, so I didn’t really have much dealing with it and I didn’t do any of it for freelance. So maybe that didn’t register as much with me. Is it all a little bit Devil May Cry HD this year? No, it’s more like Metal Gear Solid HD, you know, 2 and 3. But also like the Ico and Shadow of the Colossus collection they did for PS3, which was exquisite. And there’s obviously a Halo Anniversary Edition that released this year too. Side note, it’s terrifying that Halo is 20 years old now and that anniversary edition itself is 10 years old. And the 10 years between 2001 and 2011 seemed like the longest period of time ever. And this, by comparison, the last 10 years was like a minute to me. So yeah, that’s being old, I guess. So Matthew then, at a glance then, what did you make of this year as someone who was covering more of the Nintendo beat than the PlayStation and Xbox stuff? Things are wrapping up on Wii. It feels like, you know, Skyward Sword is like the sort of the last hurrah for the Wii. It’s the kind of the vibe there. We obviously get the 3DS launch. So we’re sort of thrust into all that, which is, you know, always exciting. That refreshes things hugely. DS has got a couple of interesting things. This year was just dominated by like some crazy work shakeups for me. This is the year where Future introduces the classic games hub. Have we talked about that on here before? I think it came up on the Dan episode a little bit. Yeah, this is where they basically took all the unofficial magazines and instead of closing them, which they might have been on the cards, they basically shoved us all together into one mega team to make the three mags. So that’s NGamer, Xbox World and PSM3. And within that structure, not to get too boring about it, but within that structure, there was the kind of the magazine production team and then a thing called the writing hub, which actually was just Tim Weaver running it and me and Andy Kelly, which so like that’s, when I think of this year, I just think of all that upset, you know, I basically got taken off NGamer proper and put onto this weird team like, you know, quite a few people on NGamer were made redundant, sadly. And you know, it was pretty much just me and Charlotte left in the end and Charlotte was editing the mag and so she was on the mag team. I was on the writing hub. So that was all quite depressing. But at the same time, I had like some of the best months of my career working in the writing hub because working with Tim and Andy was just so much fun. Like we really had it easy and that coincided with just this incredible run of games coming out. So like it was just our job to like review and preview all this cool stuff. So that was pretty fun. Did that mean that you got pulled into more doing Xbox and PS3 stuff in the midst of that? Yeah, I think one of my first things I had to do in the hub was go and review like Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3. So I went over to Santa Monica for that, I think. Yeah, and on that review trip, I was also reviewing Super Mario 3D Land on the 3DS. But that’s how rich it was. I was just like cramming game upon game. And then I got back to the office and like Andy Kelly was juggling like Skyrim and Arkham City and all this kind of stuff. It was just like an embarrassment of riches for us just to be like the writing team on that was quite good fun. That’s cool. Yeah, by comparison, this is quite an uneventful year for me games wise because I had moved on to this magazine Sci-Fi Now instead. So I was trying to figure out what my 2011 looked like. And what I came down to was like a list of things. So let’s think, I was in a relationship. I had an Xbox Gamer Score competition with my friend Andrew that got ridiculously competitive to the point where we were messaging each other taunts on Facebook about how we were doing. I did ultimately win the competition by the way. And I went to the set of The Walking Dead. So that was quite a rich year really. Yeah, yikes. There’s a lot to unpack there. Yeah, yeah. So it was eventful, but not so much in games, but weirdly because of the Xbox Gamer Score competition thing, I played more games than ever, really. I was just absolutely rinsing them. So what I found with the list this year was that again, like 2010, there were definitely more than 10 games I could have put in this list. There were 20 probably that I could have justifiably put in there. So we’ll have a bunch of honorable mentions, I’m sure. So that was basically my 2011 really. There wasn’t so much to talk about. The Walking Dead set visit was a highlight though, because that show would just take an off and become mega hot. This is just before season two came out. So I’m not a big fan of The Walking Dead these days, but I would say at the time, I was so hyped for that second season. I’d read the comics and all that stuff. Yeah, got to meet Steven Yeun, Jon Bernthal. Didn’t meet Andrew Lincoln, but interviewed him on the phone, saw him on the set. And yeah, all that kind of fun stuff. Nothing to do with games though. What were Jon Bernthal and Steven Yeun like? They’re really cool. Steven Yeun, I mean, that guy’s probably gonna win an Oscar one day, isn’t he? He’s obviously an extremely talented actor in the show’s breakout, which I might not have guessed in those early seasons, because it’s not that interesting a role that he had in the show. But then obviously you watch Minari, and it’s like, oh no, this guy’s fucking amazing. So yeah, and then Jon Bernthal had shaved his hair off. So we didn’t know why. And then that kind of comes up as a plot point in the show when he loses his shit and then they bump him off. He was like quite intense, but yeah, I think I mentioned this on the Maximum Power Up episode we went on, but we weren’t allowed to mention Frank Darabont on the set, because he’d just been fired or whatever. There was like some business going on there. So yeah, it was interesting. Went into the Herschel’s Farm barn that Sophia comes out of. I didn’t take a camera. I don’t know why that was foolish really. But yeah, it was out in the Georgia sort of like wilderness basically. And watching this zombie TV show being filmed, it was pretty cool. That’s great. What about you? Do you got any fun trips this year? Yeah, I did. I got to do another Tokyo trip on behalf of official Nintendo. This is when I went to Game Freak to see Pokemon Black and White. Oh yeah. Which I’ve talked a little bit about before about how strange it was that interviewing those guys, because they talk about the game in a very like managed, you know, PR friendly way, but also they really do pitch it as a thing for children. And I’m not a big Pokemon guy, and I always felt a bit guilty going on that trip because I got to go to like the heart of Pokemon Central and some of it is wasted on me. But I think I’ve got a good enough interview out of it. And we got some, you know, the feature was, the feature was pretty strong and efficient Nintendo. Again, like the two best features I probably wrote for Nintendo Mags were both for O&M when I wasn’t on O&M, which was quite infuriating. Yeah, that was a jolly trip. Slightly less exotic. I went to the Tower of London to see Marion Sonic at the London Olympics. And I always remember it because it was hosted by Jonathan Edwards, the triple jumper. Right. Or the long jumper. He’s a jumping guy. Maybe, it’s a very anonymous name. If you’d have told me that Jonathan Edwards is like a video games PR, I’d have been like, oh yeah, that guy. Oh no, he’s like, maybe he’s a couple, maybe like here the couple of years age difference between us makes all the difference. He was quite a big 90s Olympian. Right. Like in Britain, he was like one of our gold winning successes. I’m pretty sure he was the triple jump. I do vaguely recall him, actually. Did he have like grayish hair, like silver hair? Now he does, yeah. Once upon a time, he was young. I remember that, yeah, good time. He has aged, but he hosted it. And they hired a professional queen impersonator, as in the queen, not the band. I thought you meant the band, and I thought, wow, Taran London has. Literally at one point, they were all like, everyone’s got to stand up now, because the queen’s coming in. And then this lady came in, and she looked a bit like the queen. Like enough for you, like, in the room, if you were to say someone here is meant to look like the queen, you would point at her and go, well, it’s her, isn’t it? But if, you know, there was no chance it was the real queen, obviously. But we all had to pretend it was the queen, so that was odd. And then her and Jonathan Edward had played some Marron Sonic at the London Olympics, which, you know, if you know those games, it’s mostly thrashing the Wii Remote and Nunchuck up and down really fast. So it’s quite undignified for quite an old lady. I remember more about that than a lot of what I did on that Tokyo trip, worryingly. Because we were then on a boat down the Thames and they had a, is it a pearly king? One of those sort of cockney types covered in buttons. That is not a term I’m familiar with. I mean, is that like, is that Dark Souls level obscure cockney law? I mean, I don’t know. I feel like, because you didn’t know who any of my references are, I don’t know if I’ve just got this all wrong, but I swear there was a long jumper with Jonathan Edwards and there was a man covered in buttons. I’m prepared to believe that. But I think what confused me, Matthew, is that you said, oh yeah, it’s the cockney button man. And I’m supposed to go, oh yeah, that guy. And I’m like, I have no idea what you’re talking about, genuinely. It’s a thing. I don’t know, I’m not saying like the pearly king is like the king of cockneys, but it’s a man covered in buttons who plays an accordion in, I don’t know. Back in the days when buttons were the official currency of London. I think it’s, yeah, I think there are many pearly kings. Okay, right. It’s not like one dies and then you anoint the new pearly king. I think you’re like, look at all those pearly kings. Okay, that’s definitely enough about that. Yeah, what about other trips? Do you get up to anything else? We went to Comic Con again, just on a holiday. This was the year like Andrew Garfield turned up as Spider-Man, which was cool and endearing. It’s just the year that he does the, he’s in costume asking the question and then it turns out to be him. That was really cool. Yeah, we were like sitting right next to that, to the mic when it happened. It was like, oh my God, it’s him. That was cool. And we saw Steven Spielberg as well this year, which was rad because he told some really good stories. And we saw Francis Ford Coppola, who when we went in, everyone got a mask of, I want to say it was, oh no, it wasn’t Francis Ford Coppola’s face. It was Edgar Allan Poe’s face. And we all wore masks of Edgar Allan Poe and he made us chant the word Nosferatu, which was absolutely baffling. But you know, the guy directed The Godfather, so you’re going to kind of go along with it. Yeah. Is this also the year that the Avengers kind of assembled at Comic Con? I remember that being a big thing. Were you in the room for that? That was a couple of years before, I think. Are you sure? Because Avengers is 2011, sorry, 2012, so this would surely be the year. There was a big gap between them assembling and them appearing in the final thing. Yeah, there was definitely some marvellous stuff there, but it felt like Spider-Man was like the big, the big sort of main event that year. Yeah, a busy kind of hectic year between like all that fun and the work shakeup. And I really thought I was going to be made redundant this year. I remember going up to the big bossman’s office. I think it’s the only time I’ve been up to like floor four of the future building. And I can remember sitting there and… When I get genuinely nervous about something, I develop very quickly a really horrible rasping cough, like a nervous tick. I can remember just hacking away outside this office because I was so sure I was about to be fired. And then it turned out that they were just making my life, making my work life a bit simpler by putting me in this hub. So I was actually going to have fewer things to do, like responsibilities-wise, and just play a load of games and have fun. It was kind of like a sort of like the ultimate staff writer gig. Sounds pretty good, yeah. Yeah, it was all right. Yeah, it was funny because there were some other people who didn’t want to do it and they got moved on to other things because they kicked off, but I didn’t. I just went along with it. And I actually think, you know, I don’t think me and Andy Kelly have done too badly out of it. No, I don’t think so. I think you’re fine, certainly. So that’s good, Matthew. Pop culture wise, do you remember what you were doing this year? We always talk a bit about films and TV that we were up to at that time. Drive, Tinker Tailor, Soldier Spy. I think they were both this year. Classy stuff. Saw the absolutely terrible Tree of Life and decided that I didn’t like Terrence Malick films. Yeah, that is a terrible film. Yeah. I watched all these films. I don’t know if there was anything particularly exciting happening in TV at the time. I was still just watching Mad Men, really. Yeah, but that was basically it. Yeah, Game of Thrones started this year as well. That was big from the off, if I recall. Was that this year? Yep, 2011. Yeah, I did watch that. I got into that as well. Sorry, that’s not an exciting anecdote. You had such a long pause before you accepted that it actually happened. I was just trying to think, do I have anything interesting to say about Game of Thrones? I watched it. What about Source Code, Matthew, with Jake Gyllenhaal? Oh, I think I saw Source Code on my birthday. Oh, nice. That’s a fun film. I really like that film. Yeah, I love me a time loop drama. That one kind of delivers on it as well, I think. Justifies itself and will make sense by the end. I mean, it’s bollocks, but it will make sense within its own bollocks. Yeah, I think so. This is also the year that X-Men First Class comes out. That’s quite a fun sort of a soft reboot for the series. So it kind of gets confusing when you factor in days of future past. And yeah, I really like that. I actually did a bunch of interviews for that one. I interviewed Michael Fassbender for that one. No, wait, I interviewed James McAvoy for that one. And this was really dumb, but I was on the phone with him. And for some reason, as I was interviewing him, I slowly started mimicking his Scottish accent back to him. I mean, I don’t know why I did that. But have you ever done that in an interview? Where someone’s got a very beautiful voice, James McAvoy. I was listening to it and I just found myself copying his cadence and sounding a bit Scottish. I was there thinking, what the fuck am I doing? This is really weird. Luckily, he didn’t see it. He’s probably like, is this guy making fun of me? Yeah, I don’t think he was. I think he was very, very nice. But yeah, that was kind of fun. We got, I think we maybe got to talk to Nicholas Holt for that one and I interviewed Lauren Shula Donner, the producer, so that was kind of fun. But yeah, otherwise, it was like a few MCU bits this year. I was, Thor was this year, I think. And the Captain America movie, the first one, which is pretty good, that first Captain America movie. I was just going to ask like how different is, you know, is the kind of like the industry around film and TV compared to games as you’ve done both? Oh, it’s so, so different. It’s like, I mean, I think I mentioned this in the 2010 episode, but basically in games, it’s very linear, the sort of how you get access to games, how you get review code, how you get interviews, stuff like that. You go to the PR for the relevant company or the agency that they use. And, you know, you form those relationships and people you know in the UK Games PR, you’ll, you know, they’ll probably still be around in 10 years at a different company. And you continue those relationships and that’s how it works. TV and film is so different. Like, you know, I think that there are different tiers of media where if you’re sort of empire or that kind of level of outlet, you’re in a circle. And then if you’re, you know, more on the fringes, like we were with Syphon Out, you’re kind of like, you know, fighting to get in a little bit and, you know, going to meetings in London to remind people that you exist and all this sort of stuff. But it was like- PR hunger games. A little bit. We were really good at like punching above our weight though. Like we were quite big on, you know, just sort of saying, hey, here’s the access we get. We had a guy in the US who got access via the US for like some freebie film magazine he made. And because it didn’t ship in the UK, we just, we use, you know, he had like loads of leftover quotes that we’d use to make our content, which was really handy. Yeah, at one point we had, someone had like the magazine that they wrote for closed. So we got an entire Avengers set visit out of that freelancer. So we were very, very tactical about how to make the magazine seem like bigger than it was. And yeah, slowly built up relationships with the BBC and stuff. Very, very different. I didn’t really build those long lasting relationships you make in games. There are people in games, in games PO I’ve known for 14 years. There’s no one in TV and film who I still know really. So that’s where things differ, I think. So yeah, but it was interesting to get to interview TV and film people. That was just quite, it was cool to get the opportunity and do something a little bit different. But yeah, that’s that Matthew. So moving on then, unless you wanna talk about Green Lantern, Martin Campbell’s classic Matthew, we can move on. That’s okay. Cool, so what we do in all of these episodes, what we do is we talk about what was happening at E3 for a bit of a lay of the land, give people a bit of context, we get to the list. So this year is absolutely stacked with amazing games. So I don’t think there’s massive benefits talking about Sony and Microsoft that much at E3. So I’ll fire through it very quickly. Microsoft at E3, it starts with Modern Warfare 3 and Tomb Raider 2013, two big, shiny releases. They did quite a few long demos in this E3, Mass Effect 3 is there as well. That would release in 2012. Then there’s a lot of Connect functionality stuff built into the Microsoft E3, people talking about how you can interact with their game by talking. It was in a surprising number of games that I’ve forgotten actually. So Mass Effect 3 did have Connect compatibility. Ghost Recon Future Soldier, there was UFC was revealed there, EA’s won, Gears of War 3 was there, Halo Anniversary, Forza 4, Fable of the Journey. At a certain point, it all goes a bit Connect. There’s Connect Star Wars there, a slightly controversial Star Wars game. But honestly, Matthew, I think that in terms of Sony and Microsoft, it’s so recent now in terms of people’s memories, and this is so late in the generation, that I don’t think these are that entertaining as E3s to really discuss. Sony has the PS Vita, they go big with that. They’re massive on 3D this year. One thing I did watch in the 3D conference, I thought that’s pretty cool, was obviously 3D TVs were like a thing for a hot minute basically, then they sort of go away. But Sony made like their own 3D monitor, and it was quite small, but it was pretty well priced. It was like $499 or something, and it came with a game and a bunch of stuff, and it had a feature where if you were playing a split screen with a player, and they were looking at one half of the screen and you were looking at the other, you would see completely different screens. And instead of like the screen being split like it would normally, you’re both looking at the same panel, but seeing a different image. And that sounds amazing. I was like, wow, that’s a really cool idea. But I guess 3D was never really hot enough for that to be like a big deal. Oh yeah, stop the old screen cheating in GoldenEye. Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. Where was that technology 15 years ago? GoldenEye is a sore subject for me, Matthew. We’re still not too far off of me losing the N64 mini-draft when we’re recording this episode. I imagine you’ll have soothed a bit by November when this is going live. If you’re still bitter, I mean… I think I might have other things to worry about at that point, we’ll see. Yeah, so Uncharted 3 was the first game that they showed at this conference. They went with the boat sinking, which is an amazing sequence. I’m sure we’re gonna talk about that game a bit later. And there was loads of PS Move stuff. That was still big for them. They sold quite a lot of these. I didn’t realize they sold almost 10 million of them by this point, that’s pretty good. They showed off Starhawk, a kind of forgotten spaceship combat game and third person shooter, a sequel of sorts to Warhawk, the multiplayer only game from 2007 on PS3. That was pretty good. Starhawk feels mostly forgotten to me, but I remember playing it at the time and thinking it was pretty good. They announced a new Psychooper game. A sequel to a 2007 PS3 game. That’s just like something only you would know about. Yeah, that is why this podcast exists, so I can document this. Someone remembers. So in your real house, it’s unreal. Yeah, that is it. I’m a parody of myself. I’m a living joke. So they announced a new Psychooper game just to insult Matt Castle, which, you know, worth it, frankly. And they showed off Dust 514, which never came out. It sounded interesting. The idea was that like, while Eve Online is happening in space on the ground, things would tie into Eve Online. The actual presentation they gave was really cool. But yeah, obviously it didn’t ever really emerge in the end. But, you know, that was quite an interesting thing. So it only got caught up in. Bioshock Infinite is also at this conference. There’s like a massive cut together of footage from the game that I don’t, most of it I don’t recognize from the game. This is a game that’s famously quite, you know, had quite a sort of like muddled rush to the finish. And, you know, but the flavor of it was certainly there. And then they ended with loads of Vita stuff because of PS Vita would launch in Japan later this year in December. So big hand held year for them. But Matthew, that will do for those, I think. I don’t think there’s loads more to benefit from them and analyzing those. But Nintendo’s E3 conference, I think is actually my favorite of the three. There’s like, I think a certain point where I think it’s genuinely amazing and the best one they’ve ever done. And then it’s sort of like maybe trails off slightly. But as someone who, you know, was paying attention to this stuff, what was your experience with Nintendo E3 2011? Yeah, I mean, this was my first E3 where I went to it in person. So naturally, you know, I was just incredibly excited because, you know, I’d only ever watch these things as streams. So just being in the room, and we were quite near the front as well, you know, you kind of got the buzz of the place. This is the year they had an orchestra playing like a big Zelda medley at the start. So that was, you know, you can’t really go wrong with that. That’s just so up my alley. And I remember sitting in my seat and looking around. And the thing that kind of wowed me was there were so many people like immediately near us. And on their name tags, you could see that they were all like, you know, key people from Japanese developers you knew. And, you know, there was so many like relevant people in the room, which isn’t something I necessarily had appreciated before going to E3. I always assumed it was just a load of press. But actually we were looking around and like we saw like Sakurai was there and all this kind of stuff. You know, there was just so many interesting people in the room. It was that was that was really exciting. Yeah, it’s a strange show because the 3DS showing there is absolutely amazing. Like I think they really take this handheld with, you know, which had launched slightly middling launch lineup and hadn’t like instantly taken off. I mean, this is the year where 3DS kind of has the big price cut, you know, because it’s a bit wobbly. Nintendo feels so bad about it. They have to give us loads of free GBA downloads on it. As we established, that was great. That was a good thing. Yeah, absolutely amazing. That was absolutely brilliant. But like that’s the state of the 3DS, an indicator of its health. But yeah, this felt like here are all the things that you actually want to play. Here’s a Mario Kart. Here’s a new bespoke 3D Mario. Luigi’s Mansion, Kid Icarus, Star Fox 64. It was just like all the big hitters. And, you know, they were coming, you know, a lot of them were coming out that year. You know, they were there to play. You know, Nintendo are quite good at the announce, you know, and then release it six months later rather than the announce years in advance. Which I really appreciate about their E3s is that you can sort of trust to see something that you’re going to be playing reasonably soonish. Yeah, but then they also announced the Wii U. And I think if you just go back to that original presentation, you can see like sort of how muddled it is from day one. You can sort of see that the very first unveiling of it, you know, the first feature they show is kind of taking the game off the TV onto the screen. Obviously a core idea. But then like the second point is like you can draw on the screen and you’re like, oh, okay, that’s weird. That’s a strange thing to kind of bring up. And, you know, then they’re kind of like different perspectives on the same game, you know, you know, imagine playing Wii Golf on the TV. But when you look down, it’s the ball in the sand and all this kind of stuff. And it just, it felt very like that sort of first connect trailer that Xbox did, where it’s this strange kind of lifestyle thing, doesn’t really, you know, the games on it all look a bit prototypy. There’s nothing very sort of solid about it, you know, and they try and kind of remedy that by bringing out people saying like, oh, we’re going to bring XYZ, we’re going to pour all these games to it and give it a bit more shape. But like, you know, the only sort of bespoke thing they have is like a Lego City under covers, which ends up being pretty good, actually, this sort of Lego does GTA, I guess, move over GTA. That game is rad. I like that game. Yeah, it’s really, really funny. Very charming. One of the last properly good Lego games, I think. And yeah, it just felt a little like they didn’t have much to show for it. And they then have like this sort of spread of demos there. But they are, again, like they’re prototypes. A lot of them would go on to be like Nintendo Land minigames. And there’s like an early glimpse of New Super Mario Brothers U. But they’re not called that. It’s called like Super Mario Brothers Me or something. And the Nintendo Land games are a bit more of a threadbare than they’d end up being. And they’re just called like, well, they may have the same names. I can’t even remember the Nintendo Land minigame names. It’s like Chase Me or whatever. And there’s this little demo where you kind of look around this 3D vista, which is meant to show off the kind of graphics of Wii U, which, you know, were obviously quite underpowered compared to the next generation that was just about to launch. I had a lot of fun with it, you know, and I had this definite sense being there that, you know, let’s give it a chance, you know, let’s try and inject a bit of positivity into this, because there’s no point like taking the line that, oh, this thing is fucked, or this isn’t what we wanted. It’s not going to help us, a Nintendo magazine, you know? Like, that is not what people want to hear. That is not what people need to hear. Like, we literally have no reason to exist if the thing is not interesting. So you kind of gave it the benefit of the doubt there. And I did like the demos there. There was so little else at the show that I basically spent most of A3 just on the Nintendo stand, just replaying all their demos again and again. So I actually kind of really got into a few of the, you know, Nintendo, the Wii U minigames by the end of it. Particularly like the Chase Me, which is the brilliant one from Nintendo Land where you’re in the maze and you’re trying to escape the people on the TV. You know, that was great when it came out. It was great there. It just wasn’t necessarily like the traditional games device that people wanted. You know, it’s unfortunate it’s right there next to 3DS, which did have this classic line up of like, here’s all the games you love. You know, using this system in good ways is like very core games really. And we just didn’t have that. But yeah, like, I don’t know. The excitement of V3 kind of being there got me over a lot of a lot of the gaps. And this, of course, is the infamous E3 where I annoyed Yuji Naka. As well, which was, you know, a personal highlight. Well, it’s like certainly given this podcast a lot of content. Yeah, I don’t feel I can go back to that well one last time. I think now our own listeners bring up Yuji Naka much more than we ever do. So, yeah, I like that whole animosity, that rivalry. It purely exists in everyone’s minds because I stood in front of him in a queue and he got a bit annoyed. It’s not like anything worse than that. Yeah, don’t debunk the myth, Matthew. This is all going into the Big Book of Back Page pod, which is out from HarperCollins in 2022, just in time for Christmas. It’s 176 pages of in-jokes and also word searches, so people can enjoy that. So I watched almost this entire conference, actually, and I noted what you did, that the 3DS presentation is the best I’ve seen Nintendo do E3 in the time that we’ve been doing these podcasts, because I’ve watched all of these E3 conferences back, and you see Nintendo go through these really muddled years where it can’t quite figure out what the right focus is, or it ends up being sort of contentious. But this year, I think the 3DS stuff, back-to-back, like Star Fox and Luigi’s Mansion and Kid Icarus, is just really, really cool and impressive, and I agree that the 3DS needed the shot in the arm at the time, but they absolutely came out fighting with it. And by the end of this year, the 3DS was my most played console. I absolutely loved it. So, yes, I agree with you. The wee thing, watching it back, I thought, I wonder if they should have just waited like another six months, just until next year, early next year, when there’s a little bit more calcified of what these games are and what the kind of launch plan is. It maybe felt like they broke cover slightly too early on it. I mean, they didn’t have much competition. They might have been thinking, you know, next E3 will just be dominated by new consoles, which it wouldn’t be, but, you know, they might be right to think that. But, yeah, I just wonder if a little bit of extra time might have just solved that. What do you think? Yeah, perhaps. You know, they obviously feel the need that they have to talk about it and that is the place where all eyes are on it. I mean, he says himself, like, that, you know, it was either Awata or Reggie, one of them says that it’s, you know, the challenge is juggling these two audiences, this sort of casual audience and this hardcore audience. And actually, you know, everyone else’s, you know, the console that wins the next generation, PlayStation 4, does it just by doubling down on the core gamer, you know, and it’s this attempt to, like, marry your traditional fans with this sort of more all-inclusive, you know, all-encompassing device is what does for Wii U and what stumbles Xbox One, you know. I think everyone was facing the same dilemma, like, do we go after this massive audience that Nintendo has tapped into for the first time, or do we just, you know, really stick with what we know? And it threw off a lot of people, I think. It’s, you know, not a shame. I mean, it’s just something that happened. It’s part of the continuity of how games change. I mean, every console now is like, I earn the prize. We want hardcore players to like our consoles. And, you know, I’m fairly happy with where that’s put us in this present moment. Yeah. There’s no console manufacturer who I don’t think is doing a great job at the moment, you know. No, no. And I think they are actually weirdly building, maybe on a foundation of their being like more gamers in the ecosystem because of things like the Wii. I think the mistake is the idea that someone who picks up something because Wii Sports is accessible wants to stay at the Wii Sports level forever, which isn’t true. You know, it’s been whatever, 13 years since then. You know, those people’s tastes have like matured and developed as well. And so you’ve actually got loads and loads of people who will enjoy a more, you know, quote unquote core machine. Just this idea that there’s like, you know, a hundred million mums that you can always potentially tap into, I just think is bogus. Yeah, I think it’s just that, you know, like you say, either they planted the seeds for, you know, players down the line to become, you know, maybe someone who plays New Super Mario Bros. Wii in 2009, you know, later plays Super Mario Bros. 3D Deluxe Edition, or whatever it was called, with Bowser’s Fury this year. Like, maybe people have that built-in Nintendo nostalgia like we did from playing, you know, SNES or N64, and it kind of happens that way. So, yeah, I agree. There’s nothing bogus about it, but yeah, it’s interesting to just see how the strategy changes over time. So… It’s the Wii Fit players of yesterday, or the Sekiro players of today. Yeah, you can draw a clear line there. Citation needed. Yeah, so, OK, cool. So, just to kind of wrap up, Matthew, other stuff to mention here. So, just for the record, the 3DS launched in Japan in February, then March in Europe and America. I think I bought mine in August. I already had a price cut from a retailer just before the official price cut, so I got all those lovely GBA games, which I was very happy about. And then the PS Vita launched in December, like I said. It would launch in Europe and America in 2012. And we will address the PS Vita a bit more then, I think, when we do that year’s episode, but also we’re planning a PS Vita draft episode next year, so we’ll talk about that console a whole lot more. A lot of affection for the PS Vita on this podcast, I think. So, yes. The other thing to mention this year, Matthew, was the PSN was compromised. It went down for 23 days. There was no online play in that time, which is unimaginable in this present day, right? Because, you know, online play is so the center of how things work. I don’t really know what the kind of circumstances were, but I remember getting Infamous and the House Markshooter Dead Nation out of the deal, which felt pretty good to me. So, I didn’t get my credit card details taken or anything, but I did get two free games. I got two free games. I’m always happy. I’m a games journalist. I’m always happy with that. So, yes. Any further reflections, Matthew, or should we move on to our top 10s? Let’s do our top 10s. Okay, cool. We’ll take a brief break, and we’ll come back with our top 10 games of 2011. Like I say, we’ve done this now for a bunch of different years. I even made a Spotify playlist of all the different ones in it, so you can listen to those back to back and see what we thought of a massive period of time. So, Matthew, would you like to go first? Shall we kick off with your number 10? Yeah, I just want to flag in advance that, like you said earlier, there are about 20 things that could have gone in this list. As always, very much a heartless service. So I think I’ve got some quite biggies that aren’t on here. Yeah, I guess I should add my own sort of caveat as well, that, you know, this is, my list has one Nintendo game on it, you know, not much in the way of that. So I think it’d be quite different to Matthew’s. This is actually one of my more obvious years, I would say. Like a lot of the things on here will be super obvious to people. There’s possibly one exception to that that we’ll get to. A widely hated game. So, yes, why don’t you kick off, Matthew? So I’m actually going to kick off with Rayman Origins, which is the kind of reboot of Rayman as an excellent 2D platformer, as opposed to the not so excellent platformers. I was never a Rayman fan. This probably won’t surprise you, Samuel. Rayman 2, I thought Rayman 2 was really good back in the day. But, you know, for a 3D PS1 platformer, I thought he was doing his best, Matthew. That’s what I thought. He was doing his best. Yeah, some people have this crazy connection to Rayman 2, and I just don’t, but that’s fine. It’s all a little bit carrying barrels around, chucking barrels a lot, I think. That’s what I seem to think of when I think of Rayman 2. Anyway, we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about the good Rayman, Rayman origins. Well, I say the good Rayman. The truth is, like, I think it’s Rayman Legends is the one where this really comes together. And I’m sure we’ll talk about that when we do a later year. I can’t remember when that came out. But this… In the light of Rayman Legends, I think Rayman Origins actually feels a little simplistic now. But it’s got enough of a magic and I really loved it at the time, which is why I decided to include it. Has this really sort of like madcap energy to it? You know, you get the impression they were trying to capture the sort of the feel of a kind of like Looney Tunes cartoon in terms of these quite elastic characters that are just sort of hurtling through this, hurtling through these kind of bizarre levels in this quite sort of anarchic way. I think what works for me in this one is that the move, I think it’s the movement in this one that really won me over. He’s somehow like really elastic and really steerable, but also like perfectly behaved. Like you feel like you’re in total control of this very maneuverable character who you can kind of throw around at great speed. And you know, I think part of my problem with Rayman is he’s always a little bit sort of unknowable as a platforming presence. You know, he kind of handles like he looks. He’s just like a jumble of body parts. But for some reason this one, it really, really nailed it. It really clicked it together. It’s super fluid. And you know, this was, you know, we’d already had New Super Mario Brothers Wii at this point. And I’d actually found that a little slow. Like I’m not big into the feel of that particular 2D game. You know, I actually prefer this slightly more kind of elastic floatier character, but without going like super, super floaty. I’d say for me in the last like 10 years, it’s probably between like these Rayman platformers and the Ori games on Xbox for like my two favorite sort of 2D platforming kind of heroes just to play. I think it’s so pleasurable to throw these particular characters around. I think around that character, the platforming game is fine. It doesn’t have the kind of crazy concepts that make Rayman Legends so special. It’s a bit more traditional, just very naughty gauntlet. It’s quite difficult. It’s quite punishing. You can die very quickly and very easily. There’s a lot of trial and error elements. Weirdly, it’s closer in tone to Donkey Kong Country. That thing I was talking about in a previous episode about slightly more scripted platforming, where it feels almost like an auto runner at times. You’ve just got to go and hit these cues, and the level is going to change and collapse around you. There’s these levels where you’re chasing these treasure chests through collapsing mines, and they’re really scripted platforming, but they’re also incredibly exciting and really hectic. When you’re in full flow, it just looks and feels amazing. You’re like, oh, wow, I’m pulling off these impossible feats because this level is designed for you to be able to squeeze through the gap at the last moment. It’s really, really well done. I definitely preferred the feel of this to Donkey Kong Country. I think it’s because it has that same direction, but it has this more flexible character at the heart of it. Donkey Kong is quite a lead and kind of platforming presence compared to Rayman in this game. Yeah, which is sort of why it is my number 10. Yep, so I did play this at the time as well. I thought that it looked absolutely gorgeous. That was what was the most appealing thing about it to me. I wasn’t a massive 2D platformer guy at the time, but I remember thinking it was really cool that Ubisoft had come out with this really elaborate, just incredibly stylish take on this character I didn’t really think much about. I didn’t have a huge prior relationship with Rayman. I think Rayman 2 was very solid for a 3D platformer of its day. But the first one I never really got into was a really super early PS1 platformer. But this comes along and it kind of like, I guess I wish I had a better way of saying this, but it looks like a French comic basically. Yeah, really, really stylish. And yeah, just had lots to do with it and felt good. But yeah, I wouldn’t have made the top 10 for me just because I didn’t have that deep level of appreciation for it. I think maybe I just don’t really get 2D platformers in the way that you do, Matthew. Maybe there’s a difference there. Why don’t I not? I’m more of a 3D platformer guy these days. I think that’s why it does make the list, is because it is the 2D platformer, which I find as satisfying to kind of play as the 3D games. I love the, I just love the sort of speed and flexibility of his movement. I don’t feel like you’re fighting the character at all. And in other games, some people do like that balance. They like the, I think there is a bit more mastery of Mario in the modern 2D Mario games, for example. But there’s something about this. I think it’s just the sweet spot between that and maybe the other extreme is kind of like your, like Super Meat Boy, you know, where you’re sort of steering this sort of impossible pixel. And it makes sense in the context of the game, but you know, in any other world, I don’t know if, you know, he’s just this huge, vast jump, it’s quite a strange, quite a strange thing, Super Meat Boy. But this will sit somewhere between the two. And it’s a sweet spot for me. How do you feel about Rayman’s little mates in it? He’s got some powers. I’m like, Blowbox is an asshole. I hate the world of Rayman. Like I find it quite off putting. Like his best friend is just like a pair of symbols with eyes, which I just can’t stand. But you know, he only really comes into it if you decide to play co-op, which this has as all these 2D platformers seem to have at this time. You know, Rayman himself I can kind of put up with. You know, I can stomach anything as long as the game’s good, basically, character design-wise. Yeah, they’ve got a bit of, I find the characters in Rayman have like a European spongebob energy to them. They’re just sort of like wacky in that kind of slightly spongebob way, but through a kind of European sort of lens. That’s my angle on that. Okay, yeah, I played a bit, I played a little bit of this in two player as well and actually really enjoyed it. I thought it was well done in that respect and just fun to blast through. It was, yeah, a good effort. I may be in my head though, I’m getting this confused between my legends, so I did play both, but. Oh, legends is, oh. I look forward to talking about that and it’s Wii U specific touch control puzzles at the time, Matthew. Okay, great, so my number 10, yes, it’s funny, Matthew. I just had to boot a game out of the list because even though it launched in North America in 2011, it didn’t launch in Europe until 2012, so I just had to boot it and completely quickly shuffle around. So this has literally been added in the last like two minutes, this game. Child of Eden is my number 10. Oh, okay. So people may remember this, Q Entertainment, Mizuguchi, the Rez and Lumines guy, basically teams up with Ubisoft, his developer, and makes this first-person rail musical shooter with all of this gorgeous imagery. And it was very much a spiritual successor to Rez. You shoot the things on the screen and music happens basically. And all of the music is provided by the Genki Rockets, who is one of Mizuguchi’s projects, I think. Side note, the Genki Rockets feature in No More Heroes, as we discussed in a previous episode. They did the track that you hear in all of the shops in No More Heroes in the European version. And so I had a bit of affection for that from this. So yeah, I was quite pumped for this. I remember having a very, very stylish trailer for this at E3 2010 and I played a whole bunch of it. I then played it again a year later, I think it released on PS3 and I reviewed it with the PS Move controllers. Because this was actually quite big on motion control. You could play it with Kinect. You could play with the controller as well. But it did actually work really well as a motion control game because the gestures are so simple. You are just aiming at things and shooting things. Very, very straightforward. I think the difference, the stylistic difference to REZ is massive, though. It’s a much more sort of like nature-y, colorful, trippy, as opposed to, you know, you’re inside a computer. Sort of a little bit space whale, isn’t it? Yeah, exactly. Very much so. Whereas REZ was obviously kind of a bit more, I don’t know, sort of like nightclub-y, inside a computer, late 90s kind of sci-fi stuff. So big contrast, but quite similar types of games. I really love the Genki Rockets music in this. Starline is my favorite track from this. Starline is a great track. The Stratos mix of Starline, I think is the one they use in this. You can listen to it on Spotify, that fucking rules. So yeah, I think this game is very short, very straightforward, but very experiential in a way I really loved. I love that a big publisher backed this, backed a successor to Rez. Doesn’t sound like it sold all that well, but I very much enjoyed it at the time regardless. Matthew, did you play this at the time? Yeah, I did. I must admit, and maybe this is like a tear at my gamer card, I’m not as into the whole Mitsukichi thing as a lot of my peers. Like, I don’t know if it’s, I don’t have like much like effects. I’m not like super into that music basically. And the whole kind of like, synesthesia kind of sort of get into a sort of trance thing, it’s just not my vibe. I listened to fucking Randy Newman, like that isn’t a bit, like I genuinely do listen to Randy Newman a lot, which is like an old man tinkling away on the piano, singing about how much he liked it in the 1950s, you know? It’s a very different energy to sort of like thumping electronic music. Yeah, but you say that, but you had Tetris effect in your Game of the Year list for 2020. Oh, I did, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is true. That’s the place where it like really lands for me though. I think that’s because the marriage of Tetris, which I really love and the style around that just fed into it. Yeah, you are right. I caught you out there. Maybe I love Tetris. Maybe that’s just the one which finally clicked for me. I think it is just maybe you need that, a core type of game that you love in order to like the kind of stylistic stuff. Maybe that’s what it is. Yeah, I think it’s the sort of, I guess it’s, I mean specifically it’s this and REZ are the two, which you know, I don’t go nuts for, you know, you know, it tends to be people who are maybe a couple of years older than me are like super, super into REZ, like it’s a very like of its time kind of arcade shooter, but I just, yeah, I’ve never like massively clicked with it. I think REZ has an extra layer of, I mean, I do think it’s good first of all and distinctive, but I think it has an extra layer of credibility from being like a late in the day dream cast game, which with our peers is bound to go down really well, you know, so I think it kind of establishes it as just a favorite in that regard too, you know. But yeah, I did, like I bought this, I think. I think mainly I played it on Kinect because I wanted something to play on Kinect, which I’d obviously spent a silly amount of money buying, you know, it was this or the, there was that puppet western one, whatever that was. Guns, the Drawslinger? The Guns Stringer, that’s it, Guns Stringer. Yeah, like, yeah, two very different games. Yeah, like, you know, it’s visual spectacle and everything. I just, I don’t know, I don’t think I’m cool enough to enjoy this game. I mean, very much this podcast, if Randy Newman is piano talking about the 50s, this podcast is your piano talking about the noughties, basically. It’s very much the same vibe. Yeah, so yeah, I don’t have loads more to say about it, Matthew. I think that’s fine to leave it there, but a cool game and, you know, I assume you can play this backwards compatible on Xbox One, I’m not sure, but hopefully it’s been salvaged in some form because it really was lovely. So what’s your number nine, Matthew? It is the 3DS eShop Classic Pullblox. Wow, I’ve never played this, but have obviously seen it on the washing around the 3DS charts every now and then. What’s the deal? Yes, you play this little character who can pull blocks in and out of the background. You’re on a little 3D playing field and you can kind of pull shapes from the kind of back wall and they extend and then you can pull them out to three different like layers and you have to do this with multiple shapes to basically build 3D staircases, which hopefully makes sense. It’s one of these things that when you see it when you play it makes perfect sense because you know, it’s a game made for 3D. It’s all about pulling stuff from the background into the foreground. It’s all about depth, which makes it a brilliant showcase for 3D. Just a really tactile, physical puzzle puzzler. It’s not really a platformer as such. You know, you can’t jump around in it. It’s an idea they kind of went on to do a lot more with. They made other versions. I still like the simple purity of this. I just like that Nintendo published this thing. It was made by Intelligent Systems that had just a real kind of like really lush production values for a little download game. And it kind of jumped out at me as a pick because I was reading Edge this week, the new issue of Edge, and it had a big career retrospective with Giles Goddard, who was one of the Brits who went over to do like Star Fox and work as a sort of programming sort of genius kid, went over with Dylan Cuthbert, and he was talking about Steel Diver, which was the submarine game they made for 3DS, and he was saying that they made it as this sort of, they made it for like a version of it which could have run on like DSI web. He said internally at the time at Nintendo, they were like super down on download games. Like internally there wasn’t a lot of interest. They were like, if a game is kind of like remotely good enough, it should be a retail game. And which is why, you know, maybe DSI never really took off because they didn’t really show it the affection it needed, where I think something like Pullblox actually shows that changing quite significantly with 3DS. You know, they suddenly, you know, this is a game they could have like stretched out and banged a 30 quid label on it, but no, they did it. It’s this digital download, it’s a really premium feeling thing, you know, a really great idea, fully explored. Yeah, I just really love it. I feel like there’s an interesting conversation to be had about the, well, we touched on this a bit on the 3DS episode we did with Joe, but the idea of the kind of, I suppose, like culture of what Nintendo was making as download only games, because it seemed like they leaned towards games that were like, seemingly simple, but elegantly designed and beautiful. Was that kind of like how you saw their forays into making digital only games, Matthew? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, sort of puzzle, a lot of puzzle focus, you know, the few of theirs which really jump out, you know, is this, this Pullblox series, also more latterly Box Boy, which has got very similar energy to it. Yeah, I think that’s the defining factor. Also things which were like, like a simple little multiplayer concept that maybe couldn’t have existed as a standalone thing. There were a few of those where they had like playful multiplayer games or things that like lots of people could buy for cheap and play together seem to be the other direction they took it in. I just, it just feels like with 3DS they took it more seriously. And the conversations they were obviously having internally in DSI were, according to Giles Goddard, it just felt like, you know, this feels like a sort of shift in that, you know, as an external observer anyway. Hmm. Okay, cool. Well, I suppose then that is a game I have missed, I guess. I should pick it up before the 3DS store goes away for good. I assume it has no modern like version you can play on Switch or anything like that. Did they do a Switch version? They’ve done like four versions of this, but I don’t know where they all live. There’s a Wii U one, I think, called Pullblox World. Just looking at it now. Oh, that’s the one I’m thinking of. Yeah, there’s one which is full blocks, which is where the blocks can now fall. And there’s one called, I want to say like Stretch Blox or something, or Stretch Mode. It had so many different names in different territories, which didn’t help as well. But yeah, the purity of the original is absolutely fine. Okay, great. Well, then my number nine, Matthew, is The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim, the opposite of Pullblox, which I think is how they sold it at the time. So is this high on your list? It’s not on my list, no. Yeah, so I didn’t think it would make your list. It’s quite low for me. To a lot of people, this will be the defining game of 2011. Obviously, it released on the 11th of November that year. So it was a massive seller. I think that this is where Bethesda takes another step up to being this kind of mega monolith developer where all their games sell 20 million copies or whatever. And there’s mega hype around everything they do. So I think I said on the 2006 episode, and I didn’t put Oblivion in that one, I’m not like a massive high fantasy guy necessarily. It depends on what it is. There are definitely some exceptions to that. But in this case, I think that I had to include it because I didn’t finish Skyrim. I played 40 hours of it. I did a bunch of quests and a lot of exploring. I don’t really remember the story that well. But this game to me was all spectacle. So the visual upgrade in this from Oblivion was enormous. This snowy setting, this icy continent populated by mammoths and giants and obviously dragons when they would turn up. They just had such a stunning sense of place. I just remember this looking phenomenal on my Xbox 360. I still vividly remember watching the first trailer for this and just how gorgeous it looked, how impressive it was. Yeah, even though I don’t necessarily adore the game, I think it’s objectively very good. I think that just as the next step in Bethesda’s building spectacular worlds for you to enjoy spending 100 hours in, it was fantastic. I almost wonder if the fact that it’s so widely available now means that people have forgotten what the impact of this was like at the time because people make jokes now about how many platforms Skyrim is available on. Obviously they keep doing that because it’s so persistently popular. The difference between this and Fallout 3 for me, which I had much higher on my list, is storytelling really. The thing that really drew me in about Fallout 3 was the writing and these situations that were close to the real world and really resonated and all these memorable characters. For whatever reason, I didn’t quite manage to have the same relationship with the setting in this one, but I do understand there are some quests that people adore in this one, like one where you kind of wake up basically after a drinking contest, hung over in a place that you’ve trashed, like a temple kind of place, and then you’re tracing your steps back to find out what happened on that night. I think Matthew mentioned there’s a similar quest in one of the Witcher games, but hang over in a fantasy setting, just a good idea for a quest. I can’t say I personally really remember any of the quests though. This game to me is all spectacle. I do remember what it was like when a dragon turned up for the first time. That is an all-time great moment in games that everyone should experience. They really made the spectacle work. They made it dramatic and exciting and when the dragon went down it felt fantastic. Side note, one of the dumbest things I did in this game was in the very first bit of the game, when I was level 2 or 3, I encountered a mammoth and thought, can I fight a mammoth at level 3? The answer is, you can but you shouldn’t. I basically got it to a series of rocks where it couldn’t chase me and I jumped off of the rocks, twatted it in the arse, jumped back on the rocks and then the mammoth goes nuts trying to kill you, and then waited till it calmed down, went back, twatted it again. It took about 40 minutes I think to kill the damn thing, or something close to that, but I did it dammit. That weirdly is the thing I remember most about playing Skyrim. I think I was a bit guilty of this game of just seeing everything before the game had naturally led me there. I kind of just wanted to take it all in because I was so desperate to explore this world that had been sold as a beautiful icy place. I was walking over these icy lakes and up these mountains and past these tiny little snow-filled villages and all of these gorgeous places. I almost spoiled the experience myself by seeing it too early. Fallout 3 is very good at slowly unraveling itself because obviously a lot of the most interesting stuff is hidden underground in the vaults. I don’t think I necessarily played this properly to have the optimal experience, but Skyrim, I don’t know. I guess this is me recognising its majesty, Matthew. What are your thoughts on this one? I think I’m just really not into the setting. The high fantasy thing. I bounce off it. It’s a huge hurdle for me. The second I see someone with a cat face, I’m like, nope. Which happens on the character select screen, unfortunately. That’s a surprise from a renowned furry, Matthew Castle. Just the kashi, I think. It’s everything I hate about fantasy. Just a cat man. I really bounced off Skyrim. I’ve only played it for about ten hours. Outside of, yes, the amazing world design, I couldn’t find a single quest that I thought was interesting in that time. There was just nothing which gripped me about it. I was like, how can a world this big have so few possibilities for me? With Fallout, you leave that vault and you’re basically straight in Megaton and there’s heaps of stuff going on there. Maybe I relate to their quests because, like you say, the modern setting is a bit easier to click with, but there’s shifty goings on that I was into. The bomb at the centre of town. That’s a really interesting dilemma off the bat. Here, I’ve had so many people tell me the good stuff in Skyrim, but I’ve not found any of it myself. I also think it’s unfortunate that the more ambitious the world design gets, the limitations of certain things seem more severe, so the slightly animatronic nature of all the characters. I know this is a big Bethesda thing and the Bethesda jank and all that, but there’s something about being in a town with all these people parroting the same few lines. I just don’t find that world alive. I just can’t connect with it at all. It is one of the great puzzles. I’m glad it takes them so long to make the next Elder Scrolls because we don’t all have to endlessly have Elder Scrolls takes because mine is quite simply, I do not like it. Oh well, enough said really. Like I say, it doesn’t resonate in the same way. It is not the highest high fantasy RPG on my list which to a lot of people will make it bogus. It is worth mentioning as well that this is a game that has an enormous extended life via its mod scene which is obviously very, very important to it on PC where people are still making mods for this game and where I think Bethesda even officially supports mods in the more recent console version switches. Hilariously, one of the better games I’ve played this year, The Forgotten City, was a Skyrim mod. Yeah, I bought that game too Matthew so maybe it will come up on the Game of the Year episode. So something good did come of Skyrim eventually. That’s like a take that no one else has. It was so funny because when this first came out everyone was trying to do Skyrim, Skyrim, Skyrim and I remember in the office they were like, oh everyone who’s played Skyrim want to do a Skyrim appreciation podcast and there were like five of us in the room and it became pretty evident that I was the only one who didn’t like it and it basically got totally cut out of that episode because they didn’t want me being a grump. It’s funny the idea that you were even there. I remember sitting at my desk and whatever screen was in my eye line, any review TV, all it ever seemed to be was the rotating 3D object of the loading screen for Skyrim. So wherever I looked someone would be like rotating a boot or something with a piece of text above it going like, you know, the winter giants are allergic to berries. Great. What a thrilling old time. Well, that seems like a good place to leave it there, Matthew. What’s your number 8? My number 8 is Uncharted 3. That’s higher on my list. Oh, I think we’re going to have a quite a bit of crossover. I think you’re right with a couple of these. But yeah, we’ll see I suppose. But yeah, that was much higher on my list. So I look forward to discussing them. What’s your number 8? Saints Row the Third. Oh, that is not on my list. So I think this game rules. So I did go through a cool spell after I went through my weird Xbox Live Gamer Score thing with Andrew. We’ve just played games constantly. We’re playing games just to get points. And at a certain point, I thought, what am I doing with my life? Am I actually distracting from a larger problem? Psychiatrists answer, yes, I was. But I certainly was sort of like, I had a bit of a cool period where I thought, I can’t just play games for the sake of it. I have to get out of the headspace of achievements a little bit. That lasted for probably six months here. I think it’s because games were no longer mission critical with my day job either. That was another thing where it’s like, well, now I don’t have to play these. Maybe I should think a bit harder about what it is actually like about games. So, since the third comes out, I had played the second one. I thought it was all right. It had some performance issues on Xbox 360. I don’t think it ran great. And obviously, it arrived around the same time that GTA 4 did. There’s a period here where I think people think GTA takes itself too seriously after GTA 4 and go a bit cool on it for a while. Like there’s that take kind of floating around. I don’t think it’s necessarily fair. As I’ve established in a previous episode, I think GTA 4 was fantastic. But there was definitely room for more open world sort of like city-based games. I mean, I’d welcome them now as someone who really loves the genre when it’s done well. Saints Row the Third comes along. You create your own character, give them a voice, all that stuff. And then it is kind of like a slowly escalating series of open world adventures. They built it with like much better technology. There’s loads going on in this game at any one time, like large scale battles and stuff flying around and all this sort of thing. But it actually like ran technically very well on Xbox. And it did have a kind of quite wholesome, silly flavor to it. Like it’s not a game you necessarily play to go wow at the open world like you do with Rockstar games. That’s like a key difference. But I think all the things you were doing in it were really fun. It had a really good tone. It had its own kind of like fun radio stations, fun voice acting. I think Daniel Dae Kim is one of the characters in this. But there’s a lot of like fun, fun different characters you meet. And just generally speaking, had a lot of what I think those PS2, a PS2 GTA games did well. Just the escalating chaos, the silliness, the fun, without any of the kind of Niko Bellic pathos, which people found objectionable. So yes, I was huge into it at the time. And like in its final act, when there’s like basically spaceships turning up, and it gets really silly, it just feels colossal. It was colossal and genuinely exciting. It felt fun to do every interaction in this world. It didn’t feel like you had, he had friction as you try to enjoy yourself. I think in that sense, it’s maybe the most purely enjoyable open world game that’s ever been made. It doesn’t stand in your way at all. And it really reignited my interest in games at the time. And for me, this is where Saints Row peaks. I don’t really dig the superpower stuff that they did in four. I know a lot of people did. And like how it’s an extension of the tone of this game, where you’re the president and it’s really, really silly. I think stopping just short of that is spot on for an open world experience. So yeah, Saints Row the third, Matthew, I think this was easily the best one in the series. Did you play this at the time? Yeah, it’s not a game I’ve played all the way through. Like I’ve played bits of it over the years. Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s kind of the, it makes a lot of sense as a companion piece to the more serious GTA. I think GTA V is actually the balance I want more in terms of like sort of slickness and also a mix of sort of fun and slightly more, I don’t want to say slightly more adult than Saints Row. What is the difference between Saints Row III and GTA V? Well, GTA V does have like a story story, like a serious story. It’s at times it’s quite serious, you know? Yeah, it’s a bit like edgier and sort of higher stakes. There’s something very completely cartoonish about Saints Row. It doesn’t even pretend to be sort of governed by the sort of the any of the laws of reality. Yeah, I like it enough. I always found it a tad obnoxious for my taste in terms of the humour. Like it’s super full on and it’s very much like I’m going for it. I’m a big funny game. And if you click with it, great, you’re going to have a really wild time. If you don’t click with it, it’s a little bit self-consciously zany. A little bit, but, you know, considering no one else was really doing that, you know, you can’t really sort of begrudge it for wanting to do interesting things in that space. Yeah, at the time I was, you know, this came off the back of, you know, Red Faction Gorilla in 2009, which I really loved. I was really ready to dig Volition, there’s another Red Faction game that comes out this year, Armageddon, that I didn’t think was as good as Gorilla, unfortunately. But I don’t know, I was like, oh wow, this developer, if they just get the money and the time, they can make something really, really good. And yeah, I think their self-conscious, zany thing is probably fair. I think it’s because when they did more sincere sort of like gangster-y stuff in Saints Row 1, the tone of that didn’t go down very well. So I think they trod the line correctly here. I understand this basically got remade like last year or a couple of years ago, like there’s a really elaborate remake of it on modern platforms, which is a cool way to go play it. If you’re burned out on playing GTA V because you’ve played it for like 400 hours like I have, then that might be worth checking out. But generally speaking, this game seems to still have a good reputation. I don’t know if it’s necessarily remembered as the best one, but certainly remembered as one of the better ones of this series, Matthew. Yeah, it’s been interesting seeing the feedback to the recently announced reboot, because I get the impression with that series, you could take fans from across all four games and each one would have a very different idea of what makes that series that series. And they’ve had quite a lot of backlash, I think, from the Saints Row IV fans, because they’re basically taking it back to, I think they’re positioning it, they’ve said somewhere between Saints Row II and III. But it is interesting that this series, they are so radically different in quite a short span of time. Yeah, I think they just try something, they get excited about it and they push further in that direction. I think that’s kind of how they see it. And that was a cool way, that does make this series very distinctive. I will say for the new one, I bet when it’s in people’s hands, they’ll get excited by it. Like I think it’s got loads of promise and I hope it’s fantastic. But yeah, Saints Raith III, that’s no problem putting it on my list. Probably the game I purely enjoyed the most this year. Maybe there’s one other one further up, but what’s your number, Matthew? My number seven. Number seven, damn, numbers always trip me up. My number seven is Deus Ex Human Revolution. Horror on my list. Whoa, okay. Oh dear, it’s just going to keep happening. My number seven is Portal 2. Not on my list. Wow. Okay, let’s start with that. How come Portal 2 didn’t make your list? So both Portal games, I think, are magnificent, very clever, very enjoyable, beautifully made. They have all the traits you expect from a Valve game, and they don’t leave me cold. They just don’t… I have no love for them, you know? I completely admire them, but I have very little affection for them. It’s not something I can pin down. This is generally my relationship with all Valve games. You know, I’m not a huge half-life guy, you know, I know why they’re brilliant. I don’t play it and dispute that at all. They just… their whole vibe and outlook, it just doesn’t… it just doesn’t click with me. I don’t know why. And this isn’t a contrarian take. I will happily give Portal 2 a 10 out of 10. It just… it just doesn’t stick. It just doesn’t stick in my head. Like I just… you know, I don’t know if it’s missing an element of charm that I like in other games. Yeah, I’m sorry, that’s a pretty unsatisfying answer. But I was looking at all these games and I was like, why isn’t Portal 2 in my list? It’s just that it would be a total head choice and not a heart choice. Yeah, that’s a… you know, I think by what I know about your criteria of what you put on these lists, I think that makes sense. I think we touched on this when we talked about the orange box as well in the 2007 episode, that there is like a certain position Valve puts you in as a player where you’re not necessarily asked to like love the characters in front of you and it doesn’t take shortcuts to make you… you love bits of its world, it kind of like lets you unravel it, pick it apart and see what you think as a player. There’s just a kind of a cool brilliance to them. Yeah. I guess is sort of my take. What I will say about this one is because they cast Stephen Merchant as Wheatley, I found his performance enormously endearing. Just you know, this slightly slightly daffy kind of like AI, basically, followed by all of the recordings from JK Simmons as the guy who runs Aperture, can’t remember his name, should have written that down really, bad research. But isn’t it Clay something? Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So JK Simmons plays Cave Johnson in the game and his story is delivered basically just by quotes that you uncover when you get to a different part of the world, more of the behind the scenes-y bits of Portal 2. I think that this has to be, so I agree that it’s more of a head choice, I think my list generally is a bit more head choice-y than yours, but I do think that there’s a lot to admire in the way that you take the bones of Portal 2, sorry, of Portal, which is basically just a load of puzzle rooms built around one idea and you see what else you can do with it. So you layer on these different paint mechanics to have a different effect and then suddenly you have more tools in the player’s box and the designer’s box to build levels. And I think that that means that they get, they find ways to get a lot more out of the campaign and because the story is longer, because there are more moving parts to the story, I think that that narrative side of it is much more effective. I think that it was just immensely pleasurable to A, pick up up the puzzles, but then B, have this sort of complete story that lives in the shadow of the story of the first one, which was so simple, kind of play out. I found it really satisfying in that regard. Side note, I never quite played the co-op properly. I briefly touched upon it, but never really dabbled with it. I played a few of the different user maps that the users have made for the Steam version. That’s another cool thing about this, is you can keep playing this game forever if you really want to. Let’s move on to your number 6, Matthew. Batman Arkham City. Oh, that’s high on my list. Oh, for fact’s sake. Here’s one that might be high on your list. No, wait, no, it won’t be. Sorry. That’s my number 5. What’s your number 6? My number 6 is Dragon Age 2. That is not on my list. Okay, so there’s a lot of me talking here, isn’t there? Yeah, well, listen. I like listening to you talk about these games you like. Yep, okay, sure. Dragon Age 2, a very controversial game among fans of that series. I believe it was made in around 18 months. A very quick turnaround from Dragon Age Origins, which was this large-scale RPG that arguably bridged the gap between the Baldur’s Gate, well, not Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Knight’s era of Bioware RPGs and the Mass Effect era that would follow. It’s sort of like sandwiched in between, really. And people who played on PC had a very different experience than those who played on consoles, because you have the kind of top-down management stuff that we know is how CRPGs are played on PC. This game feels like the Mass Effect-ification of Dragon Age a little bit. It’s like they made a game that could be played on console and PC in that way that we see now with all games, all blockbuster games, you know. There wasn’t a separation. And it’s primarily set in one city across ten years, and that kind of is where you see how the 18-month turnaround is, how it manifests basically in this game. You are in a single location. There is like one area you get to go to called the Wounded Coast that’s like a little beach area and then like maybe a couple of other areas, but generally speaking, you stay within the city limits for the whole time. This made it very controversial because to a lot of people, obviously the RPG is, you know, you start in a small town, humble origins, and you kind of work your way up and have a big hero’s journey across the world. This is basically one guy in one city, loads of bad shit happens to him across ten years and like the city sort of changes around him. There’s like a kind of revolution towards the end of the game and like a lot of tension between the different factions there. And this was, a lot of people hated this because they wanted that What Dragon and Age Origins Promise which was that trad fantasy RPG experience. So, how did it make number six in my list of the best games of this year? Because this is a real heart pick for me. I think this game fights its limitations with fucking good writing and great characters. I think this is where Bioware is like, right, we will flex here instead. This is where we will kind of like compensate for the fact that you’re not really going anywhere. So this, this is up there as having like some of the best companions of the, of the series for me. So Aveline, one of the sort of like city guard who you become friends with, who wants to kind of like romance one of the guys that she manages, which seems like a HR issue to me. But like your friendship with her is like a great, really, that’s a dialogue choice you can make in the game. Sounds like an HR issue to me. So Varric is my favorite of the Dragon Age companions. He’s like a dwarf who’s got a crossbow that he calls Bianca. He hangs out in a pub called The Hanged Man for the duration of the game. So basically spends 10 years in a single pub. I always thought that seemed implausible till I moved to Bath and that basically is my relationship with the people here as we go to the same pub for like 10 years. So that is actually quite plausible. I think that this game just swings hard with the companions and the writing to make it compelling. This is the other big change is that you play a voiced character. So you play a character called Hawk who you basically shape, you choose their kind of class and stuff like that, but they have a voice fundamentally. So it’s a bit like Shepard where that defines the dynamic of the game to some extent and you have a more pronounced place in the game than you did in the first game. So yes, Dragon Age 2. I have more thoughts than this, Matthew, but I wondered if you played this at the time and if you had any thoughts looking back. No, I haven’t. I feel like I’ve absorbed so much of Dragon Age 2 from the ongoing relationship with PC Gamer in this game because it feels like it was a bit of a PC Gamer meme game. Yes, that’s right. It was basically like it got 94% from PC Gamer. I don’t know if it’s been publicly reappraised, but you will often hear it talked about by like game scriptwriters on Twitter or articles or it will regularly come up in like GDC talks. I feel like there is a lot of affection for the kind of craft and approach. I think you’re right. It feels like its reputation is like a writer’s game, which is obviously where it sounds like its strengths lie. I’m all for big blockbuster games being experimental with their formats. That’s super exciting to me. And if anything, it means multiple games in the series will forever have their place. The problem with sequels is that you improve on something and it can make going back something a bit harder. But when it’s so radically different, there will forever be a reason to play Dragon Age 1, 2 and Inquisition. They’re all substantially different things. I think that’s worth celebrating. I think that a big thing that would have helped this game, but I believe there’s some behind the scenes tension. I think they wanted to call it Dragon Age Exile, the developers, and then I think EA pushed for Dragon Age 2. I believe that’s what happened according to Jason Schreier’s book. What’s funny is that that book also notes, I think it’s Mark Darrah, the executive producer, notes that this game is one of the most profitable games versus what it cost to make because it was made so quickly. To account this, this game was seen as a massive success, even though it was more contentious among people who liked the series. I think, like I say, I agree with what you’re saying there, where it’s a sort of game that is quite easy to back these days because it’s such an unusual thing. Dragon Age Inquisition is much closer to what I think people’s idea of a Dragon Age origin sequel should have looked like, but even then that’s vastly different from origins. These games are all very different from each other, which makes the idea of a fourth Dragon Age really interesting. You know what, I’m going to replay all these and then next year when we’re closer to the new Dragon Age we can do a proper Dragon Age deep dive, that would be a good episode. That would be fun, yeah. A shout out to some more of the companions as well. Isabella, the pirate, I really liked her. She was the character I romanced in the game, very typical choice for a boring male like myself. Some of the characters I really, really pissed off and it gets incredibly nasty and you basically become enemies by the end of the game. That happened for me with Meryl, a blood mage, and Anders who is a deserted Grey Warden mage as well. There is a vast range of romance choices and friendships you can build up in this and I think that just does so much heavy lifting. Side note, this game has a great DLC pack as well with Felicia Day playing one of the characters. You go off to Summer State and participate in a hunting style game, I think it is. There is a little bit of a change from Kirkwall. I also think the 10 year thing, when you hit a limitation with it, is when you have basically done everything in the game and you are sat in your estate where there is a merchant who lives with his son and there is nowhere to go in the city, there is nothing to do and you just have this cold empty feeling of like, I am just stuck in this house, there is no reason to leave and that is an odd way to feel at the end of an RPG. Loads of bad stuff happens to Hawke in this but yeah, it is a very unusual approach to an RPG but it is so, so memorable and yeah, I really, really stand by the writing on those companions. I think that is terrific Matthew. So that is probably the most interesting entry on my list. Everything from here on will be a really predictable blockbuster fare. Let’s move on to your number five. My number five is LA. Noire. That is my number five too. Phew! Oh my god, finally some crossover. Go on. Yeah, so we talked a little bit about LA. Noire on the Best Detective episode which I encourage everyone to listen to if they haven’t listened to it already, where we chatted to Andy Kelly about this. Andy Kelly is slightly more into LA. Noire than I was, but in the context of this year I really love this game. I’ve always thought of it as just an incredibly indulgent, expensive sort of Phoenix Wright because the interrogations, you play as a detective working through various police departments and the interrogations actually have the same sort of structure as a Phoenix Wright kind of case. You know, you can present direct contradiction or you can doubt people to kind of push them on. You know, obviously it’s got a layer of complexity in that you’re meant to read people’s very photorealistic faces to work out if they’re lying or not, which, you know, your mileage may vary on that. You know, it looks like it’s going to be an open world sort of GTA game and there is a huge city. It’s LA, lovingly recreated from the time period, but really it’s just a very flashy background to an intensely linear game where you go to crime scenes and you get the thrill of stepping through the tape and walking up and collecting clues and seeing what kind of horrors await. And that for me is where the magic of this game lies. It’s almost the sort of fantasy of being able to walk into a film set. You know, I love when you drive up and there’s always people kind of rubbernecking to try and see what’s going on and you get to go in there and see the scene and you know, the thrill of it and why it worked much better for me on first time than it has, you know, trying to replay it is because you don’t know what’s coming and every case has generally got this sort of like charge of what’s going to await me when I get to where they’ve called me out to, which I really loved about this game. That kind of drama and sense of sort of theatre to those those moments as an actual detective game. Like it’s a little kind of sort of hit and miss. I find that the reliance on the kind of the facial animations, it doesn’t always work, which means it’s not as kind of clean cut as an Ace Attorney game also. And I raised this on the earlier podcast and was shot down. I feel like my favorite stretch of the game is Homicide, which comes quite early in the first half of the game, in fact. Vice is fine, and then it ends with a work in the arson department, which I didn’t quite work for me, which not just the nature of the work, I don’t think fires are as sexy as murders. And that combines with just where they take the character, you know, it’s not my favorite Rockstar character arc, but, you know, putting those minor complaints aside, it’s a fantastic mood piece, really puts you in those settings, you know, if you love LA confidential films like that, it’s, you know, a playable version of that. And, you know, it seems mad to be sniffy about such an expensive thing, so clearly aimed at my specific tastes. Yeah, so, yeah, we talked about on the earlier episode, I really love Eleanor. I think that, if you’d have asked me at the time, this probably would have been number two on my list, number three. I think that, I don’t think my interest in it is really dimmed. I think that it’s just undeniably flawed, you know, and I think that I don’t hold that against the game, though, because I think sometimes when a game takes a really big swing on something a bit different, and this is an extremely expensive point and click adventure, that’s basically what it is, with like shooting and driving in between, and like, you know, and hinges a lot on these facial animations and, you know, that got extensively memed and stuff, but is that better than just making another GTA with an Elroy skin? I would say that you should take the pun and take the risk and if it gets memed, so be it, but at least they try, do you know what I mean? That’s how I feel about it. So that’s why I have no time for the sniffiness, really. I think that your take on the Homicide Desk is a pretty widely held belief about this game. It peaks too early, like everyone says that basically. I think that’s maybe true, but I really love the episodic nature of this though. It did feel like you would like doing TV episodes basically, and then there would be like a season finale at the end of each desk basically, and then things would kind of move up because the case would have an extra element to it or the story would move ahead and Cole Phelps, your main character, would switch department. Obviously, I was a huge Mad Men fan, so seeing what was clearly the season 2 era of the cast pop up everywhere in this was delightful. It was like even minor characters from Mad Men season 2 would pop up in this in different roles. Do you think that’s because the casting directors watched Mad Men and thought, oh, this would make sense, or we can draw on that sort of thematic connection, or do you think those actors like genuinely have an oldie, timey actor look, and that’s also why they got cast in Mad Men? I believe they used the same casting director, but I think you’ve got a point there. I think it maybe helps sell it that you’ve seen people playing, you know, this game is set in what, the 40s and 50s basically, and I think that it probably does help that you can make that connection in your head. It also just gives it a bit of star power that’s quite exciting. You’re there thinking, is Jon Hamm going to be the main boss of this game or whatever? Or like, you know, but it’s exciting when Vincent Carthyzer turns up, for example, in like a minor role. Sometimes they’re doing like some quite silly voices as well that you don’t often see. And like, I find it very endearing to see these actors, you know, like Rich Summer in these minor roles from the show, like, just turn up, do these silly expressions, and then you kind of, that’s it, that’s them out of the story. And sometimes they’ll reappear as well, you meet a character in the main quest, there’s like a lot of side quests in this game, there basically are like shooting side quests for the most part. And you’ll just see like a character turn up again in a different situation across the city. That’s really cool. So yeah, I just thought it was a great undertaking, and it’s really cool. You can play it on Switch. It’s a great version on Switch as well, and it just runs in your hands. Amazing, amazing to squeeze that down to that. I mean, you know, we mentioned this before, but rock stars like run here, you know, it’s like, Bully in 2006, and then, you know, GTA IV in 2008, and Red Dead in 2010, El Inuar now, then it goes on to Max Payne 3, then you’ve got GTA V, like, that’s a hell of a run right there. But yes, El Inuar, Matthew, I still love it all these years later, and I’m quite sad that they never made a follow up of some kind. I feel like this is not going to happen at this point. What do you reckon? Yeah, I’d be very surprised. I mean, yeah, just with the backstory to this and, you know, it felt like it just got to a point where if it was like a project that could have probably been killed at some point, but then they were like, no, let’s commit to getting it over the line and bring in other people to get it finished. I’m happy for it to just exist as this one time deal. Yeah, that’s like San Andreas money at work basically. So it was worth it for that. And I did like the way it tied into the Black Dahlia case as well, much like how Elroy kind of writes his own version of that. They do the same here. And I think that even if, you know, it might not necessarily land with you, but I think the kind of idea of what they go for that the Black Dahlia, it’s a bit like a bit of a Chinatown twist where it’s like you can’t really do anything because the city is so corrupt that there’s nothing you can do to really fix the situation. I quite like that as a kind of resolution to that. Yeah. Yeah, but it is, you know, a big part of this game is pastiche. But when have you seen a pastiche ever done this well in a video game? Never. So yes, that’s it. And you know, Matthew, any further thoughts or should we move on? Let’s move on. What’s your number four? My number four is The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword. Have you played Skyward Sword? I can’t remember. Very briefly, for about an hour or so on the floating continent thing. And I’ve bought the HD version. So I’ll try and cram that in before we do Best Games of 2021. But yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we talked about this great length in the Zelda episode. That’s a good thing about building up this back catalogue of episodes. I’ve got this handy shorthand with a lot of games we talk about now. We can just be like, go and listen to this one for smarter thoughts. You know, defined by its motion controls, controversially, I guess, at the time. This one seems to split in a few ways. Like there are some people who just want nothing to do with it because of the motion controls and you know, whatever. And then there are people who do click with the motion controls but have issues with the linearity of the adventure. It’s a very sort of on rails by Zelda standards. It doesn’t really have an overworld as such. You know, you have this sky section, Skyloft, which you can fly around and then you dive down to these self-contained areas below. I mean, you can sort of see it that Skyloft is Hyrule Field, which then leads off, you know, on these three spokes to other areas, but in those areas themselves, like progression through them is quite scripted. What I like about it is the… it’s kind of like Zelda dungeon designers made the whole game. Like, the world doesn’t feel organic, but it is packed with absolutely amazing Zelda puzzle design, which I have no issue with. You know, I love their kind of lateral thinking approach to these interesting gadgets you get. Motion controls mean those gadgets have some slightly new functions, so, you know, they can even squeeze new ideas out of like old favourites, like the bombs or whatever. You know, there’s a huge amount of kind of creative thought, but for some people this doesn’t have the adventurous sweep that they want from a Zelda game. But I love all that puzzle design, you know, it’s a real kind of like, it’s a real like the mechanical side of Zelda brought to the fore, which I really enjoy. I actually think that the framing of it in the story is very adventurous. I think it has this sort of spirit of solving ancient riddles to emerge these kind of secret, to reveal these secret temples. It’s very sort of romantic idea of Zelda, like the relationship between Link and Zelda is a little more kind of sort of fleshed out, you know, by Zelda standards as this lush orchestral score which really sells it. I thought this is a really magical game. I liked it maybe a lot more at the time. You know, I gave this, you know, if you’d asked me in 2011, this probably would have been even higher up my list, you know, I’ve called on it a little, or rather I’ve just had Breath of the Wild come out and completely recalibrate what gets me excited about Zelda and that has definitely had an impact on it, but I have very little time for the people who just write this game off because of motion controls. I think they’re beautifully done, you know, as someone who had to review like so many Wii games and I know what bad motion controls look like, this isn’t it. Maybe motion controls are never going to click with you, that’s absolutely fine, but for people who actually know what they’re talking about, get a load of me. This is still the high water mark I think. So yeah, this has come up on, I believe, so obviously on the Zelda episode, which is, you know, if you want to know about Zelda, that’s one of the five best podcasts we’ve done. Absolutely. Matthew is on fire. It just feels like the Zelda thing, where they fit in the catalogue is just as important and you know, you can’t really do it proper justice here, but those were just like, those were the major bullet points I think. Yeah, so I don’t really think this game has been reappraised in the wake of that HD release. I think that, you know, it was a chance for people to sort of either share how they felt about the motion controls either way, and a chance for people to play it. You might have missed it at the time because it didn’t have Wii Motion Plus. But I don’t feel like it got reappraised. Do you think that’s probably fair? Yeah, there are a few people who are like, oh, you know, this is, Nintendo finally admit that motion controls are a bad idea by giving us button controls. And it’s like, well, that absolutely isn’t the take at all. You know, they’ve made it a bit more accessible for, you know, Switch. Switch has many more control inputs, you know, you can play the thing portable. You don’t necessarily want to be swishing your arms about. I don’t think Nintendo have anything to apologize for. No, like, you know, I, you know, I saw a few people who said they’d warm to it in the HD version and, you know, good, you know, good, good, good for them. I mean, they’re the criticisms they had of the original version that I obviously don’t hold. You know, it’s nice to have this, this, like, shinier, cleaner version of it to play. I would definitely play that, like, obviously, don’t, don’t buy the Wii version now. That would, that would be mad. Just visually, it’s so much more cleaned up. The original has, it has this sort of, like, slightly kind of dappled textured effect, which tries to make it sort of like an impressionistic painting, but it looks a little hazy and ill-defined on the Wii. It’s, it’s definitely much, much cleaner on the Switch. It reminds me a bit of how, you know, the color palette-wise are very different, but it reminds me a bit of the painterly look to Final Fantasy XII, where it feels like the style of characters is meant to kind of override the character, the limitations of the hardware a little bit. Yeah, I think, I think, I think that’s true. I think it helps as well that this, this and the 3D All-Stars collection they did show that Wii games look fucking good when they’re in HD, even when you don’t do, like, that much to them. And then maybe like, it’s just so much easier to appreciate when it’s exactly the same art or the same world, but in 1080p, and you’re suddenly you’re like, oh no fuck, this game always looked amazing. It’s just that the, you know, you had a HDTV at the time and this, this only plugged in via your SCART cable or whatever, you know. Yeah, it’s just that if, you know, if Nintendo were to ever give us those Wii games on tap, fold them into the Switch Online service or whatever to let you play them in that, you know, looking in their 1080p grandeur on Switch, it’d be amazing. I just can’t see them ever doing it. I think they’ve set this precedent now, you know, they’re always going to sell these, sell these, these sort of HD versions of them, which is a shame. Well, hey, at least it’s still, it’s easily available, which goes, you know, which isn’t necessarily the case for all of them. So yeah, good pick, Matthew. Good Matthew Castle pick. I did, and it was like, yeah, I will say like, part of the enthusiasm for this, this was, you know, this was like an anniversary year for Zelda, is it the 25th, I think? Yes, it was. Yeah, because they had that orchestral start, a score at the start of it. Yes, so there was just a lot like Zelda buzz and they did this amazing concert. That was amazing. You know, I’m not saying that like had impact on how much I enjoyed Skyward Sword, but, you know, we felt very like loved up with Zelda and this was Ocarina 3D came out this year as well. It was just like, you know, a good fun Zelda year and this was a key part of it. Maybe taken out of context. That’s why it’s slightly lower in my list now. I can’t believe Zelda is like 35 years old. I feel so old. Okay, yes, that’s good. I think this is lower on your list than I thought it would be, but that makes me all the more intrigued to see what gets higher. So yes, my number four then Matthew is Super Mario 3D Land. Is this on your list? It isn’t. I fucking love this game. I think in the 3DS episode, when we did our combined top tens, I believe I made this my number one. We have established firmly on previous episodes again, maybe we have too much continuity now Matthew, but because some of these have come up before, I don’t think we talked too much about this one. But this basically we’ve established that Matthew big into the kind of like literally galaxy brain Mario games, which are just like, you know, what if it was like 2001 of space obviously, but Mario is there. That’s what Matthew wants from Mario. That’s just a tonic ideal. Fighting God in space, that kind of like vibe. That’s where I think Bowser is God, but no, no, no, no, I mean, that’s not that’s not my reading on like the Bible or anything like that. I mean, man, if that’s what you think God’s like, that’s wild. So like everyone, I had a 3DS in 2011 and thought it was a bit of a slow start. Zelda came out and you know, that’s a really nice version of Zelda. I think that’s actually, you know, it’s cool that people can play the N64 ones on Switch Online at some point. But I really think that they worked so well on as 3DS games, like the look of them, the look of N64 games worked weirdly well on 3DS. But I was definitely, it definitely came to the end of the year thinking I don’t have anything that’s like super compelling on this system. And then, you know, two games arrived that absolutely, absolute superstar games that completely changed my perception of the console, both in terms of like, what Nintendo was making for it, but also how the 3D effect could be used. So I won’t blow what the other one is, because I think it’ll probably be in your list. But Super Mario 3D Land comes along, so the first, well, it’s the first original 3D platformer they’ve done for a Nintendo handheld. It has these diorama type levels that look beautiful in 3D. It’s almost kind of like a sort of isometric perspective. It’s not quite the same as Mario Galaxy perspective. It was just a little bit different on these kind of like blocky levels that, yeah, like I say, diorama is how I put it. They kind of look like they’ve been sort of like crafted little models for Mario to run around on, like you could imagine building them in real life. And there was something about the scale of this one, they’re kind of like short-ish levels. And just the fact that none of them were really vast, they were like kind of spacey, but not massive. That was just kind of captured the essence of the 2D Mario games, the ethos of them a little bit. And then, but translated them in a 3D space that was perfect for a handheld. And I just think it was like a proper killer app at a time when the console really, really needed it. And I think the levels are so much fun to replay in this, I think they’ve got great replay value. I think I personally maybe even prefer this a little bit to 3D World as a single player experience because 3D World’s levels are more vast and built to accommodate multiple players. So when you play through it by yourself, it maybe doesn’t feel like it’s scaled correctly. Whereas I think that this is scaled perfectly for playing in single player. And then it has an absolute fuck ton of secret levels to unlock after you’ve done the main worlds. So, Matthew Castle. That’s exactly how Miyamoto put it. I believe that was in, like, there’s a PDF somewhere in Nintendo’s FTP, so you can read that. Yeah, I think it came out of the leak earlier this year. An absolute fuck ton of levels. Yeah. So this was everything I wanted from a Mario game. This is like a top three Mario game for me. I just think that in terms of matching a type of game to a system, this is Nintendo at its best for me. This is just like, this is what I want from Nintendo. It’s like the raw essence of what Mario is, just perfectly matched to what the console is. Matthew, what are your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, yeah, that’s a brilliant point and that is the brilliant elegance of this game is that it is the perfect Mario game for the platform. You know, it is the right scale to sort of fit what the thing can do technically. It uses the 3D brilliantly. I think again for me, and I’m sure this came up when we did that 3DS episode, like I’m just so broken by Mario Galaxy in terms of my expectations and what I want. I feel like there’s this design philosophy Nintendo have about like, that they basically since Mario Galaxy, they’ve been talking about their levels in terms of acts. So they have like this sort of three act structure where they kind of introduce an idea, then they kind of push that idea a little harder and then they go crazy with it at the end. I think they may even liken it to like three panels of a manga comic. I think that might be where the analogy comes from. It’s in Inuator Asks. And for me, Galaxy had that in spades, this sort of sense of escalation. And it’s the philosophy which has driven definitely 3D Land and 3D World. But my problem with them is that I feel like they miss that third act. I don’t think these levels escalate properly. And I don’t mean to sound like a broken record. The fact that both 3D Land and 3D World, every level ends with a flagpole, I think is a huge downer for me because it’s a conclusion that lacks any kind of drama or surprise. You just know that no matter what happens, this level is going to tail back in and end with a bloody flagpole again. Which may sound like a really petty point, but it does something psychologically with these games which means they just don’t quite escalate in the way I want them to. Which is a shame because in every other way, like you say, absolutely brilliant. I actually hadn’t thought about that one player multiplayer split between this and the fourth one in this and 3D world in terms of the levels in this being much better fit for that, much better focus for a single character, which is definitely true. I do love this game. I think it is a 3DS essential. Unfairly I just can’t remove it from the context of wider Mario and for me it’s just not quite up there but in context of 3DS and indeed in the context of 2011 it’s a brilliant, brilliant game. It was the game it needed at the time. Absolutely. Yeah. I’ll tell you what, playing this on that Call of Duty trip where by day you’re watching virtual families get blown up by terrorists in London and then you go back to your grotty motel and play 3D land, that was pretty jarring. Yeah, that’s quite the experience. When you do your own version of fear and loathing, Matthew, that will be the subject basically. Yeah, so do you remember how this looked on the 3DS as well? Because that’s what I really loved about this game. This was probably one of the only games where the 3D effect really, I really loved it. I had the slider on like half full and because of the isometric perspective of the levels, and the kind of like I say, like kind of blocky, blocky but beautiful nature, like almost Duplo kind of style look to it. That just that looks so, so good on that screen. Is that how you remember it? Yeah, yeah, it’s really, really clean. You know, it’s arguably one of the few games where that depth perception like did help with things like, you know, you knew when you’re, you know, you just know when you’re above something, you know, when the jump’s going to land and when it’s not, which was like their big focus. They wanted to, you know, use it as an accessibility tool. The Nintendo have got this bee in their bonnet about people not being able to play 3D Mario games and they’re constantly wrestling with this like, do we just go all out or do we try and make something which like trains the next generation of 3D Mario fans? They had it a little bit with Galaxy 2, which had all these tutorial videos because they were worried that Galaxy 1 had just thrown off people and this again, they were like, you know, one of our primary aims for 3D land is to kind of use the 3D to help people get their head around 3D platforming, which obviously is someone who can play 3D platform games and didn’t have a problem picking them up in Mario 64 when I experienced them for the first time has always been like slightly frustrating, but you also can’t begrudge it. Yeah, it looks amazing and it just, it was just such a huge step up on 3DS. You know, we’d had plenty of fine things, you know, Ocarina 3D is like fine in 3D, but, you know, definitely not revolutionary in any way, but this one, yeah, yeah, properly did it, probably did it for me. Great stuff. Well, there’s, I don’t know. I should have put it in my list talking about it, but I’m actually worried about what this other thing is that you think I’ve got because I’m really worried my remaining games are really out there. Well, it may, it may or may not also be a game that’s got Mario in it. We’ll see, I suppose. If not, it may come up in the Honorable Mentions. We’ll see. So Matthew, that’s my piece on Mario 3D Land. I love that game, and I wonder if they ever release, if they ever re-released it, it might not make sense, actually. It’s so tied to the platform. Oh, no. They, they, I just can’t see them ever doing it. It wouldn’t make any sense on Switch, at all. No, you’d also, also the, would the screen shape work and all that stuff? I don’t know if it would actually, yeah. It’s a, it’s a hard to see. No, that would be a terrible idea. Okay, enough said. What’s your number three, Matthew? So my number three is The Witcher 2. Nice. Assassin, Assassins of Kings. Well, a tasty pick that from, we’ve not talked enough about The Witcher on this podcast and it’s like such a series, a series that people love. So I’m excited to hear on your list. For my money, this is, this is the, whatever else it does, The Witcher 2 is the best example of difficult dilemmas in games that have actually had the, the fully intended effect of stumping me. You know, people are obsessed with choice and consequence. There’s so much written about designing choice and consequence, different philosophies on what, you know, the way it should be done, different philosophies on what you’re trying to achieve with it. Loads of games have difficult choices and consequences these days and so few of them land. I just shrug them off, I’m like, OK, I’ll pick this one or that one. This game, I think, is just due to the specifics of the story, the intelligence with which it treats its story, the intelligence of the writing, the performances, the way it conveys its ideas. It just repeatedly puts you in really tough decisions where basically everything is fucked and you have to make, you know, just lots and lots of murky calls. And, you know, the cliché of, you know, you hit a decision and you put down the pad and really scratch your head over it. This is the only game where I’ve really had to sit there and think about something. It’s the only game which has ever properly worked in that regard. As an actual action RPG, it’s fine. You know, I don’t think any of the Witcher games have ever really nailed the second to second sort of combat loop or whatever. But as a piece of storytelling that kind of reacts and challenges you, I think this is absolutely superb. Like I said earlier with Skyrim, I’m not into high fantasy. It kind of helps that this is sort of somewhere between a Skyrim and a Game of Thrones. Like there is magic and nonsense in it, but it’s also a lot more to do with the politics. The setup of the game is that people are assassinating so many kings that basically the entire continent is going to fall into ruin and you have to stop the people from killing kings, which is difficult because a lot of people you meet are horrible kings who you may want to kill yourself, which I think is a brilliant sort of setup of like what you want versus what the continent needs. This game balances that really well. Probably the most dramatic thing and the thing this game is most famous for is that based on the decision you make at the end of Act 1, Act 2 is entirely different and that is the meat of the game. Like the central, I don’t know, 10-15 hours, you know, is completely… you basically see a war from either side of the battlefield. They have completely exclusive quests, side quests a lot, so it’s one of the very few RPGs you can properly play twice through and get a completely different experience. Like, it’s mad, you know, the idea of someone not seeing like half the game because of one decision they make is so bold, but it’s so exciting, and it makes that choice really important. It makes what follows really important. I think it works particularly well because the whole game is slightly shorter. It’s maybe like 30 hours all told, and because of that, you know, it is doable that you replay it. You know, a big problem I have with a lot of RPGs is they’re 100 hours long, and there’s maybe five key decisions along the way, and you feel like, am I really going to play another 100 hours just to see those decisions play differently? Where here, yeah, you can play 30 hours to see this radically different tale unfold. Just great characters, great writing. Everything people liked about The Witcher 3 is in this, except it’s not an open world. It’s super focused. I think this is just like, it’s maybe better than The Witcher 3 even. Like, it’s that good. I think that a lot of people do feel that way, yeah. Just because, I think we talked about, talked about this a bit when Jeremy came on, we talked about immersive sims, but the idea of people investing in optional content, you know what I mean? Developers making that some battleground. It’s almost too expensive to do and, you know, like you say, you risk players not seeing a massive chunk of the game. It’s a really bold thing to do. That said, it might just be the the decision that they made to do that might just be the thing that put CD Projekt on the map as like a proper big RPG developer that everyone’s paying attention to. So when The Witcher 3 rolls around, I mean, obviously, that game looks spectacular in itself, but people had played the second one and saw what they could really do when it comes to storytelling. I think that it was obviously worth it to do that rather than making the more traditional here’s 50 hours, it’s the same experience. Yeah, I always feel with The Witcher 3 that like it was the open world and the scale of it, which kind of wowed people. And then when they played it, they fell in love with the good writing. And I just think, you know, I’d be intrigued how many people then went back and played too. So I get the impression a lot of people have only played The Witcher 3, and none of the others. And that’s fine, because they’re kind of completely standalone adventures, a few ideas carry across. But yeah, I played two in preparation for three. And yeah, I was just so struck with the writing. And it was a design that puts the writing first, because it is a small world. It’s very kind of dense. It’s very packed in. There’s not a lot of downtime between interesting dialogue or choices. You know, it understands that kind of walking from point A to point B, and maybe killing a couple of spiders on the journey, isn’t really the most interesting thing about this game. And I really love the discipline it has to kind of focus it in on that. And there are definitely moments where The Witcher 3 sort of switches into Witcher 2 mode. Like there are little stretches or particular quest lines which are highly reactive in the same way, but never quite as dramatically as this. Yeah, I just love it. There’s a the end of Act 2. So it’s the end of Act 2. You know, if you’ve made one particular decision, so you’ve got one particular version of Act 2, if you’ve then teamed up with one particular character of Act 2, you can get this decision where you basically have to let this horrible monster go for the kind of good of everything. This absolutely brutal guy and it is genuinely like one of the only time I’ve had to pause a game and sit there and think how do I really feel about this guy? You know, it just really sold me on the kind of the conflicts and the consequences and then put this very sort of difficult decision to me and I think that’s partly to do with like the brilliance of Geralt but he is this sort of like complete outsider to things but he can have this huge impact on how the story plays out. You know, he can just sort of change the course of history without becoming any more or less important himself which is quite an interesting kind of thing. He’s not like the kind of the amnesiac hero who’s going to save the world. You know, he’s just this kind of sort of can be this agent of chaos. Interloper, yeah. Yeah, I just really love how he’s positioned and this game just serves that character really, really well. Oh man, witcher pod? Should we do a witcher pod at some point? Oh yeah, definitely. I replayed, well I say replayed, I played one well after playing two and three and had quite a weird reaction to that because there were all these characters I had this affection for from two and three but like earlier in their relationship. Yeah, I’d love to kind of talk about that. Also the porn cards. Was the order that you did three, two, one, is that how you played it then? No, I did two, three, one. Okay, cool. Yeah, I played because I played two when the enhanced edition came out on Xbox, which I think was 2012. So yeah, I played a bit of it but if I make it my goal then, Matthew, to get through that series, then we can, at some point next year we’ll do a witch pod. Does that sound good? Yeah, that’d be great. Cool. All right, awesome. Well then, my number three. What is your number three? Uncharted 3, Drake’s Deception. So, quite high on my list. Okay, I think this is the best of the Uncharted games on PS3. That’s how I feel about it. I don’t think it reaches the heights of two but I think it’s a more consistent game. I think it’s like really well paced in terms of how its set pieces are distributed. It doesn’t run out of momentum in the way that I think two does. The final act of two is much longer than anyone really remembers, I think, after the village gets invaded. From there, I think the game’s a little bit more of a slog than obviously it gets to the city and you’re fighting the blue dudes and you know, it’s sort of like, basically I think the things people remember of two all focus around the train sequence and going through the city which are the best bits of that game. Here, I think it’s actually got like numerous peaks and if there’s something I love about the story telling in this game, is that it really underlines the idea that Nathan Drake is this hero who’s gone on just one too many adventures and as he gets like roped into more and more bullshit from his own making, like getting stranded in a desert or a boat sinking with him on it and all that stuff, I think that you as a player really feel like, why the fuck is this guy still doing it? Which is exactly what the story wants you to feel about his adventure in this game. I wasn’t as into the father son Sully Drake thing that they do in this game that with the flashbacks that I think that Uncharted 4 rolls back a little bit and kind of puts the relationship a bit more back like they’re dubious business partners as they were in the first two games, which is what I slightly prefer with them. But I think this really like gives you the deepest look at Drake to date as a character and so much of what these games are about is storytelling and, you know, the writing of Amy Hennig and her team in bringing Drake to life and Nolan Norse performance as the character. I think this just taps into who he is better than anything else because, you know, it’s a spoiler here but I think it’s fair to say because it’s 10 years have passed, you know, this is where you learn comprehensively that Nathan Drake’s life is not as you’ve been told it is. He’s not the descendant of Sir Francis Drake. He is just some guy and like he is, you know, some guy of the streets basically and he’s kind of made his way in the world, which is, you know, a kind of a good reveal. It’s the opposite of Ray as a Palpatine as reveals go. And I really love that about it. I think that even though, like I say, it doesn’t quite reach those heights of that train sequence, the set pieces they do here are still very ambitious and very good. I like Drake’s relationship with Elena in this game too. So I think four and three are kind of weird, they do similar things in terms of storytelling, but I think they can still coexist. And this was packed with fun moments, like the opening in the kind of like London bar sort of fight where it’s like pie and chips for four quid on the bar or some nonsense like that. And you fight loads of guys who look like Mitchell Brothers. And the game adds Charlie to the mix, I think it is, the cutter, cutter, that’s it. Right so they add cutter to the mix and he’s a really fun sort of like funny character. He’s terrified of all the insects. Yeah, yeah. He’s like, he seems really brutish when you first meet him and it turns out he’s like a big softy. I really like that. And like the way it weaves Chloe back into the story. That’s cool. Kind of sad when Chloe goes off because you’re like, ah, damn, she’s such a good character. Why would you not do more with that character? Well, they would many years later. So yes, Uncharted 3 Matthew, where are you at with it? Yeah, when I replayed this as part of the HD collection or whatever it was when they re-released it on PS4, you know, I really enjoyed 2. When they played 3, I thought, oh, it’s just so many good bits I’d sort of forgotten. It’s a very strangely paced game in that it has, it whisks you between so many places. You can actually forget quite large chunks of it. I certainly had, you know, I think you focus in on a couple of like very memorable set pieces like the Burning Castle or the bit with the boat. And actually, there’s a lot of like interesting stuff in between. Like every level kind of has a little standout moment. I think you’re right. None of it particularly hits the, maybe the absolute peaks of 2. Or rather, I think we’d seen like most of its tricks in 2. So when they repeat them in 3, you’re like, oh, okay, like, I know you guys can do this. Which is something I think Naughty Dog do a lot. They rely on a couple of things that they’re, you know, they polish them up, but they definitely like to return to a few things. Yeah, so yeah, so we’re playing, it was kind of a bit of an eye opener in terms of just how much of it I’d forgotten. And I think some of that’s the fault of the game. Because like I say, it just throws so much stuff at you. You know, so many different places that some of it’s bound to get lost. But that is also why it’s a really, really good time. I really like the weirdly the level set in Syria, where you go to that kind of castle, which has become a museum. I like the idea of like, sort of, it’s a classic historical setting, a la Uncharted. But it’s also been sort of turned into a tourist attraction. So it’s that kind of middle ground between the, you know, sort of the modern day and history. And I think that’s really fun. I think you’re definitely right. The final stretch of this game, I’d argue, is probably the best final stretch of any Uncharted game. It’s ridiculous, but it’s absolutely amazing as well. Like the last couple of levels of this, like the location and, you know, that it doesn’t end with, like, a boss fight per se. It’s more of a kind of quick timey event thing is how I remember it anyway, which was just much better than the end of 2, which I think is actually bad. So yeah, I think through, you know, consistently, it’s, yeah, definitely, it’s way more consistent than 2. I think I still prefer 2, just because I have that emotional connection to seeing it do all those tricks for the first time and it wowing me. And, you know, I have a lot of affection for that. But 3 is, yeah, quite, quite, quite spectacular. I’ve still never truly clicked with, actually, no, I think 4 solves some of my problems. But I think 2 and 3 as actual shooters are kind of murky. And there was some, I remember there being some real sticking points in this for me where I just got massively stuck because, you know, I was trying to like play it too carefully, you know. It’s a weird game that kind of does a lot of things to sort of flush you out and make you constantly be moving. It wants you to kind of engage with these big environments. And like, unless you play by its rules, it can be a little kind of mean with it. The boat, the fight in the shipyard. I remember being a huge pain in the ass in this. Yeah, it’s like it’s like enemies from all different angles and trying. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That’s the thing. It’s just like, you know, if you play it as it’s as they want you to play it, you know, it’s all thrilling. You’re jumping between this and that explodes over there and you swing here. But it can be, you know, until you kind of click in with like, oh, it wants me to do it like this. It’s yeah, game has a few, a few kind of irritating quirks, but I agree with that. And it looked amazing. The PS4 version as well is, it just looks incredible. Yeah, it looks like a step up from two and yeah, you have to just see it on on PS on PS4 to to appreciate just what a step up it is. I don’t disagree with that. I believe that the aiming was quite controversial at the time, just how you could like use the stick to aim. I think they patch that because it was something something a bit unusual about how they did that. I think it had sort of like a square aiming, just something that like I remember being controversial about that that they changed. One thing they did that I really liked was they added context sensitive melee attacks, which you really get the best taste of during the London pub sequence, just because it’s like, you know, slamming a dude and, you know, into a into a toilet or a table or whatever. Like that was quite fun. Smacking a pie into the film it. They really were all bold in that pub, though. It was like, it was like when he’s in London, but it was like they got handed like a load of EastEnders episodes as their research for London. Yeah, so yeah, that was good. In fact, I’m just going to look up Matthew, how much that pie and chips cost. Okay, yeah, here we go. Pie and chips, three pounds. I mean, in what economy is this game set in like 1972 or something? I mean, yeah, very good. But yeah, Uncharted 3 Matthew is a favorite of mine. And I’m sure this isn’t the last time that Uncharted is going to come up on this podcast. So yeah, so that leads us to your number two. My number two is Ghost Trick Phantom Detective. Of course, yeah, not last year, this year. Yeah, only just literally the very start of January. What a great way to kick off the year. Yeah, this is Shootakumi’s departure from Phoenix Wright, which I was worried about because obviously I wanted him to make Ace Attorney Games forever. And instead he made a game about a man who is killed, his soul leaves his body and can possess domestic objects. And he has to use this power to save the lives of others and work out what is going on across one very hectic night. I would say is the pitch. Mechanically, it’s kind of like an anti-final destination in that you’re in these rooms where people are going to die and you have to use little props around them to sort of save their lives. You can’t interact with them directly. You can’t communicate with them, but you have to do things. You know, you have to sort of set up sort of domino rally type contraptions to kind of knock out killers or make sure killers aren’t in the room or to, you know, famously someone has, you know, you’re trying to get someone’s pills to them before they have a heart attack and things like that. It’s really, really inventive, little kind of point and click puzzles. But what I think is absolutely amazing about this is that as a bit of plot structure, it’s a mate, it’s brilliantly done. Like I say, it’s told across one night. It’s a very complex, time hopping thriller. I won’t really go into it because it’s packed with spoilers, but you have to achieve an awful lot in this one night and the way it kind of whips you between scenes is brilliant. But I think the thing which is really special about this game is because you play as this ghost, it uses that to basically tell the story in a really elegant, clever way because you are a being who can be in any location at once. You can travel through the phone lines. I think it’s one of the greatest bits of narrative design I’ve ever seen in a game because the mechanics and what you can do as a ghost kind of frame and drive the story in a really, really clever way. So when it wants to do a scene change, you can travel through phone lines and you can be in all these different places at once. So you can kind of see stuff and witness stuff which tells the story. It never cuts away from the ghost. It’s all brilliantly self-contained and it uses, not to be too wanky about it, but it almost uses the fact that your ghost as the perspective to show you this really cinematic story unfolding in the background. And the way that all kind of adds up and mixes in with the puzzle design, I think it’s really, really special. Like it’s just a game where like everything, everything sort of serves the story. The story completely, you know, is justified by the mechanics, you know. It’s actually like relatively fast paced the writing. It’s not like tons and tons of dialogue. It isn’t a visual novel like Wordy, like Ace Attorney. But it’s just so clever. Like you come out the end of it and you’re like, that is just like, what a brilliant, ingenious thing. You know, what an amazing work of kind of clockwork construction of this story. And you know, it still has emotional beats as well. You know, I’m not saying it’s like super clinical, but you know, it’s really sort of just funny and clever. And every time I play it, like, you know, I try and leave a gap in between so I can forget little bits of it. But every time we play it, you’re like, wow, just like what a smart thing. Like, Shootakumi is actually, you know, freeing him from Ace Attorney, like, he can do some crazy, crazy other stuff. And Ghost Trick is like all the proof you need that he should be kind of untethered from that and allowed to basically do whatever because, you know, he is just I, you know, I may like Ace Attorney more, but I think Ghost Trick is like his best game. Okay, interesting. That was going to be the question to ask, yeah, about like how this ranks next to those. Something I’ve really kind of built up an understanding of from this game, Matthew, is that because of the spoilery nature of how the story kind of plays out, there are the moments in this that will really sell you on what it is are too good to spoil almost. Is that kind of fair? That’s kind of like the vibe I got from listening to Retro North’s episode on this last year is that that is the challenge we’re talking about this game is that you it would spoil it to understand why it’s so good almost. Yeah yeah absolutely yeah it’s just it’s the idea of like like every story scene and beat is also like a puzzle that you’re playing you know you could you could see it coldly is just a series of these puzzle rooms where you’re trying to achieve X but the way that in achieving X it tells more of the story or reveals more of the backstory or sets in motion things which are going to be hugely relevant you know in a couple of hours you know across this this very long night it’s um yeah like kind of impossible to break down but it’s it’s it’s so beautifully tuned it’s almost like it sort of reminds me a little bit of like what people like about Back to the Future in terms of you know it’s really entertaining but it’s also kind of like an amazing kind of kind of bit of time travel sort of silliness but it all kind of works and it sets itself up amazingly there’s brilliant Brilliant payoffs. Yeah, I really can’t recommend it enough. This was very almost my number one. I was really torn between this and what I’ve picked. Yeah, well, it is your number one. I’m not even sure what it would be. Okay, yeah, interesting. A good pick. If people want to play this, then the iOS version is unfortunately the easiest way to do it. It doesn’t look as nice, but you can at least experience the game, which is good. And it’s compatible with the latest version of iOS. They just took it off the store and put it back on again. So that’s how you go play that one. Go and play it. Brilliant. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. It never gets brought up when people are talking about like narrative in games. And it is one of the best. Okay, so my number two Matthew is the far more predictable Batman Arkham City for this. We’ve actually talked about this relatively recently when we had Timur on the podcast. I say recently, probably not to the listener because a month will have passed since that episode, but. So the timeline of this episode is as confusing as Ghost Trick. So let me give you a sort of like framework of where I was at in 2011. This is probably my peak interest in Batman around this time. I had just gone back into the comics at this time. DC Comics had killed off Bruce Wayne in the Batman RIP event and Final Crisis. And they had installed Dick Grayson as Batman with Damien Wayne as his Robin. So in this case it reversed the dynamic a bit where Damien Wayne was the grumpy little bastard and Dick Grayson was the more chill Batman. So yeah, Dick Grayson was a former Robin turned Batman basically. And this change of dynamic is actually probably the most interested I’ve ever been in the Batman comics because I think they did a really good job with younger, more chilled out Batman figure. And around this time they started doing wilder and wilder stuff. Grant Morrison was writing things like Batman Incorporated where Batman would become franchised and there’d be a Batman in Japan. Different countries would have their own versions of Batman based on all of these like really obscure 50s designs and stuff like that. And I was so into the Nolan films, obviously. You know, The Dark Knight Rises was hugely anticipated. Would end up being quite a contentious film. But this year they released a super early trailer around this year that we first heard, I say heard in quote marks the Tom Hardy Bane dialogue and the way he would do the voice on that character. And you know, I was just mega, mega pumped. I’d gotten into like the animated series and all this stuff. I was so into Batman. Rocksteady had made Arkham Asylum, this contained location, Metroidvania-like Batman game that was so atmospherically perfect. Even though I think that we talked about it on the 2009 episode, I think the later parts of that game with the Titan fights, basically fighting lots of big dudes, didn’t work as well for me. But obviously as someone who had wanted to play a good Batman game for years, was really grateful to have it. And this for me just took it one step further by taking you into, I would say, an almost open world. Is that fair, Matthew, an almost open world? Yeah, it’s very like, particularly designed though. Yeah. It’s got like the same level of attention as Arkham Asylum, but it’s just a vast city. It’s quite a weird blend. Yeah, so I think what I loved about it was the fact they transferred to more of this traditional Gotham setting. Because in your head, you’re thinking, I think Arkham Asylum starts with you seeing the Batmobile driving through Gotham. And you’re like, well, one day it’d be cool if Rocksteady did that. And this was them taking a big step closer to that. Draws in a whole bunch more of Batman’s villains. The Mad Hatter side quest in this, where Batman hallucinates and you’re fighting on a giant clock, kind of collapsing after being at a dinner table, is one of my favorite moments in this whole series. I think this is where they really flex their muscles with showing you how much they love Batman and his universe and how they can make it work in games in quite an interesting way. And I really dug that. Obviously the story still has big Joker and Harley Quinn vibes to it. It seems like Hugo Strange is the main villain, but then there’s kind of like a bait and switch basically. All of that is quite interesting. The Mr. Freeze storyline they do in this is probably the best villain story they do to take a lot of it from Heart of Ice from the Batman animated series, but they make it work in games incredibly well. I just really loved it as a depiction of his universe. They made the combat more complete as well, giving you stuff like the freeze bomb to throw at enemies and just perfecting that kind of like counter-attack, 360 degrees melee system. Just really, really good to see them take that same template for Arkham Asylum that was more contained and make it work in an open world setting. Like you’d come across clusters of the open world that were clearly designed to be basically stealth levels for you to figure out. And I absolutely love that, Matthew. What do you think? Yeah, no, I think all the stuff you love is the stuff that’s great about this. Make sure I’m not stepping on my own toes here in terms of what I said in that tomorrow episode because I can’t really remember. Yeah, like I don’t know if it ever had anything for me that was like quite as special a standout as the Scarecrow moments in Asylum. But weirdly, I think one of my beefs with the Batman games I think is actually outside of the missions around them. When it actually comes down to the one-on-one encounters with the villains, I don’t think many of them, maybe any of them, particularly land for me in terms of the actual boss fights and stuff. I know everyone always says the Mr. Freeze in this one, but even that, I was like, yeah, it’s fine. You don’t like the idea of you can only do one thing to him once and then you have to change tactics. It’s kind of Metal Gear-y in a way, I quite like it. It’s better than some of the others. I just think, I don’t know how you feel about how it actually treats when you actually have to fight a classic villain. You know, I don’t remember a lot of those as highlights of this particular series. I think that’s probably fair. Those aren’t the bits I really remember about the game. I always think that the main story, the second half of the main storyline in this is a little, I think once you actually know what Hugo Strange is up to, and it has this sort of mystery. They keep talking about this protocol 10, and what that is is actually very underwhelming. Like, it’s just a bloke firing a little missiles at a city. Which, you know, of course. I just wonder if maybe where it goes in its story lands better or hits slightly harder if you’re more, like, super, super invested in Batman lore and his relationship with the Joker and everything. But, yeah, I mean, you know, I love the combat system. I love the stealth system. You know, more of that kind of, the way that, like you say, that it blends some of that in with open world sections and that you can happen across these stealth sections embedded in that world. Really, really exciting. The kind of Metroidvania structure of it split across the city. Really, really well done. You know, eight great cast of villains, regardless of how well some of them are individually treated. Like, I know that Catwoman in this is also a little controversial in terms of some of, like, the writing around her or just the fact that everyone endlessly calls her a bitch, which I remember being sort of spicy at the time, but I did like the beginning of that trend of them making other heroes and them feel, or other playable characters, and them feeling, like, really distinct and as fully fleshed out as Batman, a trend which I really liked when it continued into Arkham Knight as well. I mean, yeah, it’s, you know, I put it slightly down lower on my list than you, but it’s, you know, a brilliantly made thing. Yeah, it’s funny, this series is so firmly in the rear-view mirror now, because it’s been, like, you know, six years since they made another one. And, like, they’ve, at the time, you know, before we’ve, well, after we’ve recorded this, they’re gonna reveal the Suicide Squad game that Rocksteady’s been making, which, you know, I’m really excited to see. And, likewise, Gotham Knights is gonna get more spotlight as that’s meant to release in 2022. So, you know, some parts of this series will emerge again. But it’s so, like we said before in this podcast, it’s so odd that this series is so popular that it kind of, like, ends. And then, you know, there is no follow-up, basically. And that’s quite unusual. So I think this, maybe that makes it a little easier for this to dull in the memory slightly. But at the time, it was just so the main event. You know, another small thing, but I really loved the marketing for this game, the black and white and the red they did for all of the art and stuff. I think it just, it felt like such a huge event. And when it came along, it just, it didn’t really disappoint. So I get why people really, like, go to Bat of Arkham Asylum in terms of, like you say, the scarecrow moments are really hard to live up to. And they arguably don’t, I don’t think they quite try either. I don’t think they really try and do the same thing again. Yeah, but like, some of the Ra’s al Ghul stuff’s pretty trippy and it’s like, yeah, it’s fine. Stuff like the, what they did with the, to make it an open world game, I really love though, like how gliding works in this game, how you kind of like, you pull down and push up again. And like, you just, you know, there’s loads of different ways to get around the city. They’re incredibly exciting and fun to do. They, I think it’s maybe easy to underestimate how much they expand as Arsenal and how much like the combat is increased and is improved in this game. It’s something that’s really spotlighted when you play the challenge rooms in this. Some of those are just some super fun, like ways to extend your relationship with this game to keep playing it after the main story is done, which I did. They added a bunch of DLC characters like Nightwing and stuff that have a bit of a different vibe when it comes to combat. And so if you’re a Batman fanatic, you get more ways to enjoy it. Yeah, yeah. Just a really kind of a complete package. And because it doesn’t have the Batmobile stuff, it doesn’t have the contentious edge that Knight does for some players. But we established that this podcast is pro Arkham Knight, as we talked about in that tomorrow episode. Yeah. What is your number one, Matthew? My number one is Xenoblade Chronicles. I completely forgot this came out this year. Yeah, I don’t think it’s too shocking to put up there. I mean, I guess the shock factor with Xenoblade was that this thing which was sort of being made by Tetsuya Takahashi, who was the sort of the mastermind behind sort of Xenoguise and Xenasaga, which I haven’t played. And I know that there is a very passionate following for them and that they’re also a bit of an acquired taste. You know, that he was a bit of a sort of, I don’t even want to say odd boy is not right. Very much like working in his own niche at sort of Square. He said Square Enix? No, he was. Yes, he was at Square Enix. He worked on Final Fantasy, among other things. Yeah, so he’s working on it. So he’s working on his niche at Square Enix. And so the news that he was making something with Monolithsoft for Nintendo, it hadn’t really like registered. We saw the occasional screenshot of this and thought, oh yeah, that looks kind of pretty. But we also know that kind of open world games aren’t really technically possible on the Wii and that they, you know, pretty, you know, it didn’t like register as a massive concern. And then it turned up and like, man, were we wrong? Like this game has just got one of the greatest sense of sort of scale to it I’ve ever seen in a game. It’s a JRPG set on the back of these two sort of titans who were sort of locked in battle and have kind of dealt a death blow to one another and are sort of frozen in time. And you are exploring their bodies as the civilization that has grown on them. So like, whenever you look up, you see sort of like, you know, the tower and kind of back of this giant monster that you live on and even though the areas are like, self-contained and there’s like a bit of loading between them, not much loading though, it’s kind of crazy how fast this game moves in that regard. You know, it really sells you on this fantasy of that you’re on this giant structure and that each level is, each area is like a different part of its body and you know, the kind of conditions of them, it’s got like a sort of swampy lower back and like a big sort of, which is horrible, and like a giant kind of this gaur plain, which I think is like its upper leg that you can explore just this vast sort of field, these sort of humongous kind of cliffs down either side, it’s like a giant canyon. It’s a game where like the scale completely trumped the specifics of it. Like it’s fine looking in screenshots, but you don’t really look at like the low resolution or the textures, you’re just looking at the amazing size of this place and the imagination of it and it completely kind of broke through its technical kind of restraints. It’s genuinely like one of the most amazing looking games on Wii and still looks pretty stonking now on Switch. They did the kind of remastered edition. I think what I love about this game, I’ve like on this podcast and indeed just talking to like other peers and friends, like a lot of people I know have like a very deep nostalgic relationship with certain JRPGs, often Final Fantasy games that they fell in love with on PlayStation when they were kids or whatever. And I felt like I never really had that kind of intense relationship with a JRPG. This game, I just, you know, I guess through the necessity of the job, just spent enough time with it for it to get its claws into me, like this feels like my JRPG. You know, this is the world I love. These are the characters I love. The music is just like absolutely pounded into my brain. You know, I love the story of it, you know, the emotional beats of it strike me in the way that the big emotional beats, you know, a Final Fantasy probably struck you, you know, and I just have that. It’s something that can only really happen in games of a certain scale where you just spend so much time in a place or with a thing that you develop such a sort of close bond with it. And you know, it’s great if you can have that experience, but someone who’s hadn’t had that, I really have that with this. And so that’s probably why it feels super special to me. It’s also just, you know, okay, full of anime nonsense, but the story is pretty great. You know, the characters are strong. Got sort of Shulk, who’s this sort of boy with a mystical sword and mystical ability, but he’s surrounded with lots of, you know, quite an interesting variety of pals and a combat system which is focused on controlling one character and then the other people kind of auto attack, but you can kind of chain them together and basically get people to kind of combo certain moves for devastating effects, but you can also change the playable character so you can experience the combat system with like a completely different move set or different role, you know, like playing as a healer is very different to playing as the warrior, for example, which, you know, in a game which has got hundreds of hours of content, you know, being able to spend time as different people and experience, you know, it gives you the time to kind of dig into those systems. Yeah, this is just absolutely amazing. And like, I don’t know many people who have played Xenoblade and really bounced off it. I think most people have a similar relationship with it. I don’t really know how successful it was in the grand scheme of things. You know, it got a European release a good year, I think, before it came out in the US. Famously, the game would be described as the JRPG that’s too good for America, classic NGamer cover line. The Game FAQ thread on that was fantastic. That was less than almost childish. Oh, I just love it. I love it. The music is so good. It’s just like three different composers, you know, it’s got old Shimomura doing her thing. There’s Mitsuda does, I think, like a title track. This band, I think they’re a band or a musical collective called Ace Plus, like a rock band, do all these like absolutely rocking tunes. Basically, everyone does different thing. Oh, God, is there anything more old man and dad like than me going absolutely rocking tunes? I mean, any more old man than talking about why you don’t like the Genki Rockets, but do like Randy Newman? I don’t like Genki Rockets because I prefer rocking tunes. But they basically like handed different bits of the soundtrack to different people, I guess people who fit, you know, the requirements. And the soundtrack for this is an all-timer. I mean, it’s just unbelievably good and I still listen to it loads. But basically, all the stuff you say about the Final Fantasy is you love, that is how I feel about this. I find it really interesting, though, that you formed that relationship with a JRPG series in your 20s, because, you know, for me, Final Fantasy was such a, like, you know, I played 10 when I was 14, I think, and then I played 7 and 8 at the same time, and then, you know, really formed that bond with the series at that point, which I think is true of a lot of people. So I find it really interesting that this happened to you in your 20s, which probably speaks to the quality of the storytelling in this game, you know, and the world. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I’ve always attributed it to time, like I always, my theory was that people fell in love with these JRPGs, not because they were necessarily young or they were aimed at 15 year olds. It’s just that at 15, that’s the only time you ever have time to play a hundred hour JRPG, you know, it’s just that there happens to be a crossover in availability and what the genre requires. But here, because I gave it the time or I had the time or, you know, because of the job I felt like the need to play through it. I didn’t even review it for NGamer actually, I just played it because I felt like I needed to know about it because, you know, it was, I mean, Kitsy reviewed it for the mag and it, you know, it was quite hard to please on that mag at times and he was really like, even he was like, this is absolutely amazing. I was like, oh shit, you know, if it’s like impressed Kitsy then there must be something to it. Yeah, really good. And it came with a, when he bought it, it came with like a digital download of like 10 tracks, which I had on my PC, like from that, you know, I basically worked to those tracks for like the next two years. You kept those in a folder called absolutely rocking tunes. Yeah. In case of sadness, break out these rocking tunes. Can I ask, where does this release fall relative to you moving off of NGamer? I suppose what I’m asking is how, to what extent was this like a big NGamer game for you? You didn’t review it, like you say, but does it attach itself to that in any way or? No, like we didn’t really go that big on it. We did do a cover. We had some quite nice cover art on it. I mean, maybe like this came in the last hurrah of like the traditional NGamer team. This would have been when it was, you know, not everyone had been given the chop. So maybe that that factors in to part of it too, but it wasn’t like, you know, I didn’t feel like we went above and beyond. Like we definitely didn’t give this the love in the run up that we should have given how good it turned out to be. You know, we were usually pretty good at being on top of things. If anything was we thought was going to be remotely good, you know, we’d go pretty big on it and make sure it was well served. But this one, like even this one managed to sort of pass us by a bit. Okay, interesting. And that new edition is definitely the way to play it, right? It looks tons better. Yeah, it looks absolutely amazing. It’s got the original soundtrack, but they also did like re-orchestrations of everything. You know, it’s got like they made, well, I say made, they, there’s a new, there’s an extra chapter of it set in a completely different location, which I think was based, I think they, it was based on some stuff that they had made for the original and didn’t get used. But like, it’s a whole new, like, I don’t know, 15 hour chunk of game to play. It’s like a, it’s like a epilogue to the main campaign and sets up what I hope will be Xenoblade Chronicles 3. Well, I mean, you know, almost certainly, I think that second one sold pretty well on Switch for what it is. So yeah, Miraculous, the series managed to find an audience on Wii, really, which wasn’t considered like a big RPG console till the very end, arguably. Yeah. And then yeah, and then has persisted through the Wii U era right up to now. So good for them, basically. Yeah, I feel like maybe because they are not working in the absolute cutting edge of like next gen consoles, that Monolithsoft had a bit of the maneuverability that like Square Unix used to have in its golden age of like PlayStation, like where it could make the games quite fast, you know, like, like they’ve made, you know, they’ve made Xenoblade Chronicles X and 2, and, you know, this remaster and they did the big kind of expansion for Xenoblade 2, like all in the course of like, I don’t know, not that many years, 10 years. While also working on Breath of the World. So, yes, like, they feel like it felt like a weird return to that kind of quality and like mindset and just pure like production line of kind of PlayStation Square Enix, which I think is exciting considering how slow Final Fantasy has become as a series. It’s pretty wild. A good recommendation Matthew and a fine pick for number one. So we come to my number one, which is Deus Ex Human Revolution. So I’ve recently been playing the original Deus Ex, very irresponsible really because I should be playing newer games to prepare for our end of year podcast. But I have I’ve played all the other Deus Ex games through. I know the series very well, but the first one I never finished, I thought I’d go through just polish off for the first time and see why the kind of like it costs such a sort of like far shadow. And the thing is, it was, you know, is an amazing game. It was like it measures the impact of your choices so so well in a way that the other ones wouldn’t really follow. But I think when Humor Revolution came along, it captured enough of what made that series great and put it in a world that was appealing to people who, you know, were maybe playing adjacent things like, you know, people who played Call of Duty could feasibly look at this and get excited about it, you know. I think it really, really helped. They led with this black and gold color palette, this very confident art direction and kind of like cyber-punky world that people could get excited about. I think that when Deus Ex came along, it was maybe a more nebulous sell, like I think people looked at the cover and thought it was kind of matrix-y, which is sort of is, you know, kind of conspiracy stuff, but not exactly. It was just, you know, it was an everything game, Deus Ex, as we talked about in the Immersive Sims episode. This kind of like quite firmly goes with, you know, do you want to play it in stealth or do you want to play it, you know, with action? And, and in doing so gives you lots of options to how to do both. So you can do the old Deus Ex thing of hacking turrets and, you know, cameras and stuff like that, sneaking through vents famously. And you know, at the same time, if you’re playing the action approach, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to play it lethally. So you can, you can sneak up on enemies. Adam Jensen famously has a move where he can break through a wall and snap an enemy’s neck. But you can also do things like, just like punch an enemy to take them down with these very satisfied CAD animations if you get close enough to an opponent. So how, there’s like a vast different, vast array of ways you can play it. The levels aren’t kind of like massive in the way that the original Deus Ex was, but they were big, they were definitely big enough. It had enough of the scale of the original to make it work. The highlight of this game, I think, is the Hengsha setting, which is where it kind of like the black and gold kind of cyberpunk cityscape is incredibly exciting, including the Hive nightclub you can go in. I think it just really has a powerful sense of place. But generally speaking, I think this restored what was great about Deus Ex while making it feel contemporary and exciting at that, in that moment. Thoughts Matthew? Yeah, no, I completely agree. I actually, I sort of prefer the opening area, the Detroit to the Hengsha. Oh yeah? Yeah, I mean, just in terms of like, when I think of this game, I think of like sneaking through everyone’s offices in Sarif Industries. Yeah. As like, that is just a classic hit of Deus Ex, like right up front. And also like the police station as well. I really liked. I’m not knocking Hengsha, it’s fine. The other areas, it’s really good too. Yeah, I completely agree about like the taking like the ideas and the tone, but like updating it into this just really playable game, like it’s really slick and powerful. I love the first third person split that they do when you’re in cover, I think that’s really, really well done. They just sort of sell you on that character, like it’s, you know, you are powerful, but this is more of a direct power fantasy as well, which I really like. It does that without like losing any of the intelligence or brains, it doesn’t like dumb down at all. Like you are still playing exactly as you want to, it’s just that whatever you do will probably look better. And you’re right, those canned animations are just, they’re so good, they’re so well done. Yeah, I do really like it. I think, and I can’t remember if this came up when we were doing the immersive sim episode, like I think the one, the one little problem I have with it, which is why it’s slightly lower down my list is that I feel like it’s much stronger in the first half. I think as, as this game and indeed many immersive sims go on, like you develop such a wide spread of powers and upgrades, the individuality of approaches begins to wane a bit and you begin to sort of see through the design a bit more, like you get to locations where you’re like, well, I have the power that will punch through that wall, or I could lockpick that door, or I’ve got the power, it’ll take me through the ceiling. You know, these are basically three different powers. I think it’s a great way to get the idea of the show to come out. I think it’s a great way to get the idea of the show to come out. I think it’s a great way to get the idea of the show to come out. I think it’s a great way to get the idea of the show to come out. I think it’s a great way to get the idea of the show to come out. I think it’s a great way to get the idea of the show to come out. I mean, you buy a couple of powers at that point, so you’re really having to be creative with what you’ve got to try and achieve your goals. But for those hours, it was exactly what I wanted. I think a lot of people talk about this era of games that we focus on in this podcast. I think they talk about it as the dumbing down or the simplicity and push and pull with casual gamers and games that play themselves and that sort of stuff. And I think that in doing these podcasts, we’ve really illustrated there was just so much gold in these years. And this was, as games went at the time, incredibly intricate. And it was a way to transfer that kind of complexity of a PC game to consoles without it feeling too compromised. PC players love this as much as people who play on consoles. I think I agree with you that this and Mankind Divided are both like flawed masterpieces to me. They’re like maybe one open world away or, you know, like another two, a year and a half of development away from being a 10 out of 10, you know, just like giving you that extra third act kind of push. I think both this and Mankind Divided have the same thing of like, there’s not quite that last, you know, third to really sort of get you super pumped and to make it feel like all of the potential is realized. Nonetheless, it’s still my game of this year. I just, I remember like, I remember my ex at the time was like napping, napped for like three hours and I just was glued to the screen playing this. And I was just so impressed by how much you could interact with that Detroit setting of like, you know, sort of seeing, can I go behind here? Can I do this? And you’re like, you say the Sareph Industries thing and like, interacting with every NPC if you want to and punching the guy who’s break dancing if you really wanted to. Obviously, the Adam Jensen throwing a vending machine. Yeah, exactly. And doing all the classic Deus Ex things of like, oh, there’s a link chain link fence here. I can’t get behind it. But if I put these boxes stacked like this, I can jump over and I can do it. And it’s like, that is pure Deus Ex. And then obviously, in terms of like setting, sort of highlights the Adam Jensen apartment is, you know, going into there and the shutters opening. And it basically feeling like Deckard’s apartment from Blade Runner. And just and all the different like bits of paraphernalia around that tell you bits about what Adam Jensen’s going through at that point in the story. You know, side note, like, you know, JC Denton’s, you know, he’s fine and he’s an iconic character in Deus Ex, but he’s not really, he’s not really like the front and center character in some ways, like because you’re following Paul Denton throughout that game. Paul is like the main character in a lot of ways. Like he’s the one who’s one step ahead of you on every discovery in that game, every story beat, and feels, at least in the first half, and feels kind of like the center of our story. Here, Adam Jensen is built so confidently, and he is a man with a gruff voice, and those can be quite hard sells to make them interesting and make them work, but I think you really buy into his place in this larger sort of like conspiracy, and because the opening tells you what his story is basically and what’s happened to him, I think it really just sells you incredibly well on him as a person in this world, and that heightens your connection to it. Really, really good, Matthew. Yeah, I wish they got to make a third one because I think they could have really, oh, I’d love to see what a game, a modern game in this world would look like on like PS5 and stuff. Yeah, I mean, of the things they’ve made since, none have been as nowhere near as good as this, or just natural fit, and you could tell from the interviews, it was just such an energised team, completely in love with it, and doing it proper justice. There was a lot of like, these were good games to do magazine features about. They were good people to talk to. Yeah, Jean-Jacques Belleter, I think, was the art director. Oh, that’s right, yeah. He talked a good talk, for sure. And yeah, the art direction of this game is phenomenal. So yeah, dates very well. I replayed it, I don’t know, maybe five years ago, when the, just before Mankind Divided came out. So yeah, loads of reflection. You played the version with the shitty boss fights patched, shit tweaked. Yes, I have, yeah. So that was obviously a good change that they made. I think you make an interesting point about how immersive sims change the longer you go on, because I think you do get to a certain point where you need a bit of firepower in this game. And that happens in quite a few immersive sims. I think it’s happening to me in Deus Ex now actually, where it’s like two robots are chasing me and my leg has been destroyed as JC Denton and I’m kind of hobbling around Hong Kong looking for someone to fix my leg. That’s quite funny. You’re just shouting, fix my leg. Fix my leg, someone fix my leg. Oh dear. So yeah, Deus Ex Human Revolution, my number one. Matthew, we did it. That’s 2011 done. I always love making these podcasts with you and hearing about what you were playing at the time and what your experiences were. They’re always an absolute pleasure. So thank you for sharing. I’m glad, we’ve got some crossover there, but those are pretty different lists overall I think. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely some heart picks in your Dragon Age IIs and your pullboxes. So that’s good. So we move on to the honorable mentions, Matthew, to cap off this episode. Why don’t you kick off with one of yours? Shadows of the Damned. Yep, that was one of mine too. Yeah, I thought it might be. That feels like a very, this podcast. Is it like Alpha Protocol where it simply cannot be? No, no, no, I actually like this, it can be, it can be. I think, I like, and again, I know it’s too easy to read things into these games when you know who was on them or whatever. I think I prefer the McCarminess of this to the pseudo 51-ness. I think that as an actual third person action shooter, the feel of it and things, which I know it kind of feels, like I can sort of fit this in with Resi 4 and Evil Within in just the way it sort of feels. And then your mileage may massively vary on how much you find pseudo 51’s big boner jokes funny. Yeah, that’s where I fall with it too. I think that the tone was the thing that I didn’t quite jive with. On paper, this sounded like the perfect Sammy Roberts game. I was like, I can’t believe my luck. It’s basically, it’s Resident Evil 4 through the prism of no more heroes. Like what, how can this be anything but a 10 out of 10? And then yeah, there’s just something about the finished product that left me slightly cold. But I still really liked it. I thought it was really inventive. Interestingly, this is an EA game. Did this have some teething troubles in development that were touched upon in that Archipel documentary? I seem to recall that, Matthew. Oh, I don’t recall myself, but I mean, with the people involved, you could maybe understand. Yeah, but yeah, I like it too. I think, basically, the situation with this now is you can play it on Xbox Series X, but you can’t buy it on the digital stores for whatever reason. So if you want to play this on a modern console, get the Series X with a disk drive and then get a disk copy, put it in, and it will work in, I don’t know, 4K or 8K or whatever. Shadow’s the damn 8K. Yeah, any more to say about it, Matthew? No. I think, yeah, it was like a seven when I wanted it to be a nine, you know? That was kind of where it fell. A nice feeling seven, though. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it was an interesting seven from an interesting experimental time for EA. So my first honourable mention is Dead Space 2. I will confess. Oh, that’s literally the next one on my list. I have not finished this game. I actually have started playing it very recently. It’s a bit like Spin to Sell Conviction was in the 2010 episode for me, where I knew it was a big deal, I thought I should play it and see what I think. It’s quite interesting how, did you find that this was a bit more Uncharted-y influenced in terms of cinematic set pieces and Isaac, the main character, talks? Yeah, obviously to a very different end, but yes, the result of things moving along a bit. Yeah, for sure. The first one feels a bit more like, we’ve played Resident Evil 4, and we want to define what a survival horror game is in this new age. And then this one is a bit more like, well, Uncharted is big, so making it more of a character driven story game is cool. I think that much of what I like about Dead Space is here. There’s a purity to original Dead Space that I really dug, which is why I picked in that one. But truthfully, because I’ve not finished this one, that’s why it’s not made the list. How about you, Matthew? Yeah, again, it’s probably in my top 20. It’s got a couple of standout moments. I’d say it’s more actiony than horror. It’s quite intense in terms of the pressure it puts on you. I think Dead Space 1 is the scarier game, but I liked the more manic cinematic vision of this. And of course, it has the famous bit with the eye. That’s quite good. That’s the whole Church of Unitology thing as well. It’s like a sort of Alien 3-ish kind of backdrop, sort of. But yeah, bit different, bit of a different flavor. What’s another one of yours, Matthew? Did Catherine come out this year? No, that’s the game I was talking about that I had to boot out of my top 10 at the last minute. That came out in 2011 in the US in summer, and then it came out here in like early 2012, so. Okay. Yeah, but… That doesn’t make the cut. Well, Mario Kart 7. Yeah. Yeah, like I thought this was great. I know, you know, I did not like Mario Kart Wii at all. I thought this was like a kind of return to form for Mario Kart. I loved the multiple vehicle element of it, the pan gliding I thought was really nice, really like tactile. It doesn’t get used, you know, in a hugely interesting way, but it’s, you know, it’s there and it’s really well implemented. It looked absolutely gorgeous. You know, I loved the mix of new tracks, old tracks. It wasn’t necessarily like a Mario Kart, you know, I didn’t become obsessed with this and play like hundreds of hours of it online with friends or anything, but I really liked it for what it was. I think Mario Kart Wii almost put me off Mario Kart a bit and it wasn’t until Mario Kart 8 that I kind of properly got back into it and fell in love with playing that split screen like in O&M with like Joe and Kate. But this was a good Mario Kart. I was a bit cool on this one. I don’t really dig the gliding in Mario Kart. I think like, I don’t really add much for me. And that was like the big thing they were like selling this one on. It was a Mario Kart at a time where the console really needed one. I think though, as well Matthew, I really, really love Mario Kart DS. Like I got so, so into that. And this just didn’t get its claws into me in the same way. Maybe I played that too much. Maybe the tracks just weren’t quite as good. But for some reason, that DS one clicked in a way that this one didn’t. Yeah, it might just be a time thing again. So, you know, I had, yeah. But yeah, I still really liked it too. It looked really nice as well, of course. I think like with Mario, as we discussed, Mario 3D World, sorry, 3D Land, just a great one-two punch to bring the 3DS to life, to really jolt it to life. Yeah. Exactly what it needed. So my next one is Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3. So I really, this is like the end of my relationship with Call of Duty really. I was very big on the modern warfare story art because it was, the way it kind of went from like more SES James Bondy thing to preposterous, like world ending nonsense. I must get Makarov, damn it. I was quite big into that. I like how this game, the E3 demo they showed at that Xbox conference was you start underwater and then like you kind of like a submarine goes past you and it feels quite tense. And then you kind of like basically emerge and you’re next to Manhattan while it’s at war. And it’s like so big scale and silly. And I really dug that. This has the very, very funny sequence where there’s like a family in London on holiday. I don’t know why they’re on holiday during like World War III, but they are. I mean, if the pandemic has taught you anything, people will go on holiday anytime if they can. But basically this is this family going, oh, I see your beautiful family taking a picture. Oh, we’re on holiday in London, it’s so nice. And there’s like, boom! And then there’s like gas in the background. And it’s just so, so heightened and melodramatic. But I think that I really dug the price and soap characters. I thought they were quite fun as like gruff dudes. And then obviously like, one of them dies at the end of this game. And then the last level is you getting a mech suit and getting revenge on Makarov. And it’s so, so silly. But it’s proper like Bond, isn’t it, at this point? Yeah, but I think it worked. I think, certainly at the time, in the moment, I just really, I would go to it. Like I said, I played it on this slightly bleary eye review trip. I did like it. I actually really liked the perspective switching thing and the way that the different perspectives can offer different mechanics and things, you know. I think that’s, I think it was a very dumb game made by quite smart people. I feel that way about all the modern warfares, really. And this one definitely ended up on the silliest note, but again, it meant it kind of sort of stood out and was its own sort of thing. A bit, there’s the sort of plane crash where you fly around with zero G. That is rad. Is that Air Force One you’re on or something like that? Yeah, I think so, yeah. Yeah, that’s a great level because I think what it does is it gives you a series of objectives that you can’t fulfill and you fail them one after another as the situation gets worse and worse. And as a bit of scripted game designer, I thought that was really good. Yeah, yeah, I did like it. Yeah, I liked the multiplayer in Modern Warfare One and Two a lot and I played both of them a lot, but this one, I just never could get into it. This is definitely like, I don’t think it was necessary it was the game. Maybe it was just like age finally, or not having the time or just the inclination, but this basically marks like the end of me playing online multiplayer. Yeah, I totally get you. Yeah, I wasn’t a big card multiplayer guy myself. So what’s another one of yours, Matthew? Shout out for Bullet Storm. Oh yeah, of course, yeah. Which like, it’s sort of like short and obnoxious, this little thing that kind of pops up but it made quite a big impact. It’s quite flashy. I mean, it’s, you know, obviously the hook is, it’s got all the sort of experimental weapons and you’re meant to string these horrible combos and take people down in as violent a way as possible to get like mega scores, you know, the whole score attack thing. I don’t know like how well it actually holds up in that regard. Like it’s not a side of the game I massively got into. You know, I enjoyed it very much for the single playthrough I had, but I don’t know if this ever developed like the community of people who are, you know, really enjoying the score element. You know, I don’t know if it technically work as that kind of game. Maybe a bit early for that, you know, about three or four years or something. I don’t know. Yeah, but it’s, you know, it’s flashy, it’s fun. Lots of creative swearing. If that’s your jam. Yeah, I like this one too. I’m glad it’s been like salvaged. I do think the dialogue is something you go along with or you don’t. What’s the line that I’ve seen things that will turn your your asshole purple or something like that. And it’s like that sort of thing. I think Rick Remender is the writer on it. A very prominent comic book writer. So another one of mine is Infamous 2. I thought this is a lot better than the first one. They picked a New Orleans type setting and went with them. I think they did motion capture cut scenes for the first time. So it kind of looks superficially like Uncharted in terms of how they how the kind of high quality and stuff. I think it’s a more colorful and interesting game. The first one, it still has the really silly, silly choices. So I was looking this up just to discuss in this episode. There’s a quest where early on you go into a village and you have to like power a generator to lower a bridge. The good choice is to charge the generator just enough for the bridge to lower. The evil choice is to overcharge the generator to blow up the village, taking down many militia, but also all the innocent people. And like that is a choice, kind of sums up Infamous, I think. It’s just like broad strokes, you know? It’s like lower the bridge or lower the bridge and blow up a village. You’re like, oh, yes, classic dilemma. Watch out, the witcher three. And it’s like no one in the village can even enjoy the bridge at that point because they’re all dead. They picked this New Orleans type setting. That was quite interesting because, you know, they have a whole district that’s flooded, which is quite a bold thing to do. But I don’t think they’re kind of exploitative with it. They’ve got kind of similar types of like building design to the real New Orleans as well. And it captures the flavor quite well. But because like one district of the world is flooded, and you have electric powers, you actually have to like do a lot more platforming and jump from bit to bit because otherwise you’ll land and you’ll just you’ll get damaged because you’re, you know, you’re always electric essentially. So, yeah, Infamous 2, I think it was a solid superhero game at a time where, you know, people weren’t really making those based on well, apart from Arkham City, of course. But, you know, Spider-Man games weren’t really around, so it was a perfectly solid little thing. So what’s your next one, Matthew? I was going to give a little shout out for Ghost Recon Shadow Wars, the 3DS launch game. Again, I think it came up in our 3DS episode as it’s a little turn-based tactical game, sort of, I’ll say, in the vein of XCOM, but without the kind of the meta game stuff. It’s just very character driven in the levels, made by Julian Gullop of original XCOM fame. So it’s got good pedigree. Just a 3DS launch game that had no fanfare whatsoever, but was secretly probably the best game in the line-up. I think it’s relatively easy to pick up these days for cheap. So you know, just a kind of a weird little hidden gem that I recommend to people. That’s a good call. I played that recently. I think it came up on Gamescore, the retrial, and I bought that and played it to talk about it on that podcast. So that’s two podcasts. You can go listen to us talk about that one. Good shout. Resistance 3. Here’s another one of mine, another PS3 brown shooter. This one’s a bit more Half-Life 2-ish in terms of how they did it. They kind of dropped the large scale set pieces of the first one, sorry, the second one, and kind of dialed it back to being a bit more sort of like world and story driven. Main character they swapped out completely. They basically designed a guy that looks exactly like Jon Hamm as the main character. And I mean like exactly. It’s probably like the best one of the three fun brown shooter of the time, like really kind of like solid and the sort of thing that you don’t really get as a PlayStation exclusive these days in this era of like third person action games that last for a long time. Yep, I was fond of the Resistance series as I’ve made clear on this podcast multiple times. What’s another one of yours, Matthew? I’m kind of getting into the dregs. Yeah, I’ve only got one more after this. I had a tiny bit of affection for Alice Madness Returns. Yeah, it was good. Like good art design, but doesn’t quite land as a sort of platforming action game. It’s quite uneven. It’s almost like a sort of shitty shit version of Psychonauts. It has a lot of the same qualities, but it’s just a little too janky and repetitive. Just lacking in kind of wit and too focused on being sort of edgy. But some quite striking visuals to it. Some of the combat has got a little bit of snap to it. It’s kind of got a sort of Zelda-y, sort of zedlock on system and a similar sort of rhythm to some of the Zelda combat, weirdly. Yeah, it’s fine. Not top 10 material. That’s good. Okay, well, mine are all just the HD remake I mentioned earlier. So the Ico in the Shadow of the Colossus collection. That coming out was fantastic because Shadow of the Colossus always had a few kind of performance issues on PS2 because it was obviously straining at what that hardware could do with the giant monsters and stuff. This kind of completely fixed that, put it out in HD. This is exactly what I wanted for the time. Felt very pandered to by that release. I don’t think it was the first time I played Ico, but it was like the second time for years. I was glad they put that out. Because it was just like the PS2 games in HD, it didn’t have the kind of conversation about art direction that happened around that Shadow Clauses remake a few years ago, which I thought was very good. But the MGS HD collection as well. Metal Gear Solid 3 is another game that had a few performance issues on PS2. I think they ran at 60 frames on Xbox 360 and PS3 and it looked fantastic. Nice PS Vita version of that game too. And Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary, which let you switch the new HD graphics on and off at will. And I thought they did a really good job with that. A lot of it was adding LEDs to bits of the world that weren’t there before. But hey, I liked it. But yeah, HD collections and stuff like that just seems to really pop up around this time. People start taking, I don’t know, I guess game preservation quite seriously. So that was meaningful to me. Any more thoughts Matthew or should we say goodbye? I think we’ve talked through quite a few games. Yeah, it was good. It was comprehensive. These episodes always are, but they’re always a pleasure. So where can people find you on Twitter Matthew? I am at MrBasil underscore pesto. I’m Samuel W Roberts. If you want to follow the podcast, it’s the Back Page pod on Twitter. You can email us questions at BackPageGames at gmail.com. We tend to do these episodes every 10 to 11 weeks. So you can be pretty sure that the the next one will come in probably early 2022 at some. So we’ll keep you informed on that. In 2012, I look forward to hearing where Matthew puts Hitman Absolution in his list. That’ll be fun. And otherwise, thank you very much for listening and we’ll be back next week. Bye for now. Or is it? Matthew, so in this episode, which I don’t remember because we recorded it weeks ago, and anything I said in there, I remember almost nothing about it. We forgot to talk about Dark Souls, probably the most important game of 2011. And that’s good, isn’t it, for a three-hour podcast about the best games of 2011. So how come it’s not in your list? For the very simple and boring reason that I have just not played much to it. I’ve played up to that first boss on the battlements, the big chap who jumps up onto the tower, and basically kills you repeatedly, I couldn’t tell you anything beyond that. This is a game I’ve bounced off over and over again, and that may seem weak because it’s such an important text, and so many people I respect love it and recommend it to me, and I’ve read so much about it that I love, but I simply cannot get further in it to have an opinion. That’s fair enough. So it’s similar… Well, I suppose I have got further into it. I’ve got to Anor Londo, and I think I’ve mentioned on a previous episode of this podcast, I was playing with Wes, a former colleague on PC Gamer, who was kind of like holding my hand throughout the game, which is very kind of him. They got to the point where I no longer had enough of the resource to summon Wes, and so I was kind of stuck by myself, and it hit home just how shit I was at this game, and like how poorly equipped my character was for it. So I got to the… Why have I forgotten their name? Ornstein and Smaug… Yeah, that’s right. I was thinking Smaug’s the Lord of the Ringsting, right? Dark Souls fans just tearing their hair out at this. Yeah, so I played a good chunk of it. I definitely respect the vision of these games and obviously the kind of like sort of embedded in world storytelling and item descriptions and stuff like that. The overall kind of vibe of it is very different. I think the other thing is that these games represent the kind of opposite of what people felt at the time was like a softening of game difficulty with the rise of big blockbusters that loads of people were playing. Dark Souls in the kind of HD era was a bit of an outlier, so I absolutely respect it on that level. I suppose it just wasn’t… If I put it on my list, it just wouldn’t be true to myself of what I play and what I enjoy. And I say that as a guy who really likes Sekiro and I can’t quite add up why I like Sekiro and not Dark Souls by comparison. Sekiro is my favorite of the From Software games. I haven’t finished it. I’ve only got up to that bloke who kills you with lightning on top of that tower. But that’s… I loved what I played of it. I just, again, can’t have an opinion beyond that point, which is frustrating. I think for me it probably just comes down to personal sensibility. I don’t get much out of that relentlessly grim world, especially because I make so little progress in it and I struggle so much in it. There’s not really anything there for me to hold onto and grip onto to drag me through. And I understand completely that the stiff difficulty is what creates a very special bond with the progress you do make. And there are games which I would deem harder than others where I have that special relationship with them because I fought through them and I feel like my victory was harder and it becomes more meaningful. That storytelling that you mentioned, that kind of embedded law that people eke out, it doesn’t do a huge amount for me, I must admit. Like, I don’t particularly, in any games that I like, go beyond the game ever. I like games that are kind of contained within their worlds. I don’t get a lot out of fandom around games in terms of fan theories and things like that. That stuff kind of leaves me cold. So I would say Dark Souls is basically a perfect storm of things I’m not interested in are all the things that it does spectacularly well. Yeah, I mean, that’s a personal preference and that’s fine. I definitely appreciate the fact that there’s a whole kind of, you know, sort of movement around discussing and dissecting these games, you know, obviously, Keza, who we’ve had on in the past, has read a book about Dark Souls, You Died, I believe it’s called, and there’s like YouTubers like Lance McDonald who really dig into the kind of minutiae of these games. You know, that’s, I love seeing those kind of like pocket sort of industries of discourse pop up around games like this. That’s cool. But yeah, I just can’t put it in my top 10. It’s just being completely truthful. You know, like, sort of like running around naked in Saints Row, the third was more true to what I was doing in 2011 in gaming wise than playing Dark Souls. But I kind of wish I’d given it more of a go in retrospect. I think I thought, oh, maybe this isn’t for me straight away. And then maybe I just needed to give it a bit longer. So I kind of wish that with the 360 copy I had at the time, I properly gave it a go. But I didn’t really. So, yeah, I don’t know. I think I missed the boat on it slightly. And then then there were loads of them suddenly. And then there’s obviously, you know, Elden Ring coming out. And yeah, there’s, there’s always just so much from software content. Yeah. Does is that about it, Matthew? I would think that, like, well, hey, putting this at the end of this episode is good because if you’re outraged, you know, bad luck. You’ve listened to us for three hours. We held you hostage for this wrong take right at the end. Through listening to this, hopefully you have an idea of our tastes. You know what we like, what we like and where we come from with these things. You know, I think it is understandable that Dark Souls doesn’t particularly sit nice against, you know, alongside, you know, I like Ace Attorney. That’s one of my favorite game series of all times. It is, it doesn’t share any of the same qualities. Everything is on the surface, just where I like it. That is definitely not a, I think Dark Souls is bad. I just know that it just doesn’t do it for me. I think we can leave it there, Matthew. So maybe I should have called this episode The Best Games of 2011, brackets, except Dark Souls. Oh, you should call it that. That’s great. Okay, yeah. Let’s do that. So at least it’s there in the title. So you know, people can just get angry straight away rather than like waiting three hours to get angry. I love it.